The Seagulls Have Landed

One of the sure signs of spring around here: The seagulls have arrived! A gang of them always come up the river from the coast in spring, to spend the summer here.

More signs of spring:

 Flowers are being planted in the parks and graveyards.

 Trees and bushes are slowly turning green.

 I bought some daffodils for my balcony. (In Swedish we call them "påskliljor" = Easter Lilies)

My strawberry plants have survived another winter. (In the late autumn, I wrap the box in newspapers, put it under a bench on the balcony, cover the bench with a tarpaulin - and hope for the best...)

There is still some life left in the clematis, too - at least in one of my two plants. One may have died, but the branches are all so entangled with each other on the trellis that it is very hard to tell which belong to which pot... I shall have to wait for flowers before I decide what to do! (I seem to remember that those are slightly different in colour between the two plants.)

We had a lovely sunny weekend with some warmer winds at last (although back to colder again now!) - but where did my feet (and the bus) take me? Not out into the countryside; but to the big shopping district across town...

 Photos taken from a glass-covered footbridge across the main road, connecting two main parts of the shopping district.

 All for a good cause though (well, in my opinion anyway)...

A new tablet, to serve as companion to the laptop (which serves as "desktop" in my study) and the mobile phone, whose memory is beginning to struggle to keep up with all the app updates. 

I gave it some thought, and arrived at the conclusion that a good tablet might allow me to free up some memory on the phone, and make it possible to keep that for bit longer instead.

I would probably have bought a new tablet even earlier, if not for the fact that it's such a struggle to decide which one to buy... 

I've had another kind of tablet before, but it was never a very good buy to start with; and by now it's very outdated, so more trouble than help, really. (Because it's not very good, I don't use it much, which in turn means that when I do want to use it, for one thing I have to charge it, and then it also wants to do a million updates before it allows me to do anything else... By which time I've usually lost patience with it and turned to either the phone or the laptop instead...)

So I've been spending quite a bit of time searching and comparing etc online to find the "right" kind of tablet. But there are so many things to think of, and always so much additional tech information that is just 'mumbo jumbo' to me as I don't know what it means...

But with the arrival of Spring to inspire me, I decided on Saturday to go out to one of the big media stores - the same one where I bought my laptop, and also my camera. And again I felt I got good help there, to check my "thoughts" about what I wanted, with a sales person who seemed to know what he (as well as I) was talking about. It resulted in the purchase of a Lenovo TAB4 10 Plus. 

So far, I think we (Len & I) may be able to get along well... Even if it always takes a bit of time to get properly acquainted! 

One area where I do think the tablet will be helpful is when it comes to reading and commenting on blogs. (I often read blogs on my phone, but find it difficult to comment from there.)

Writing blog posts will probably still usually be a job for the laptop, though, as that is where I collect my photos!

Book Review: The Stranger Diaries

The Stranger Diaries by Elly Griffiths (2019)

Read on Kindle + Audible (10 h 30 min)

Elly Griffiths is perhaps best known as the author of the Ruth Galloway series – and mentioned by me a number of times before, including a recent review of The Stone Circle, the 11th book in that series. (Ruth is a forensic archaeologist with a tendency to get mixed up in mysterious modern-day deaths as well as really ancient ones.)

The Stranger Diaries, however, is a stand-alone, 'modern Gothic' mystery novel.

Clare Cassidy is an English teacher specializing in classic Gothic literature (like the books by Wilkie Collins, author of The Moonstone and The Woman in White, and several others). Clare is especially interested in another writer of the same genre and time-period, with a connection to the school where she is teaching – 'R.M. Holland' (a fictional character). She is doing research to write a book about him. But when a colleague and close friend of Clare's is found dead, horror fiction and 'real life' begin to get mixed up in a way that is just as spooky and scary as the classics. In particular, certain clues seem to point to a short story by Holland entitled The Stranger. (This 'story within the story', written in the classic Gothic horror story tradition, is frequently quoted and referred to, but also included in its entirety in the novel.)

The narrative perspective shifts throughout the book (reminding of Wilkie Collins). In between excerpts from The Stranger, we get to take part of events as shared by Clare (who also keeps a diary), her teenage daughter Georgie (who, as so many teenagers, leads a kind of double life – not sharing every detail of her 'private' life with her mum any more...), and the female police detective investigating the murder of Clare's colleague. (This may sound confusing, but it's made clear by chapter headings who is the narrator in each chapter. And in the audio book, four different actors are reading the different parts.)

I enjoyed the book, and as I had it on both Kindle and Audible, it kept me in its spell the whole weekend (allowing me to shift between reading with my eyes vs ears)... I guess it helped a bit that I did read both The Moonstone and The Woman in White only a few years ago – even if I don't recall every detail, at least I get the references to the genre as such. Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Tempest are also referred to. I read Macbeth back in my university days (English lit), but I don't think I ever read The Tempest. I may have to remedy that! (On the other hand, it's easy nowadays to find summaries of old classics online.)

I was also reminded of Edgar Allan Poe, but I don't think his name was actually mentioned anywhere within the book.

Anyway, I do tend to like books that make me want to read, reread and research other books as well (and old classics in particular)... 

The Times They Are A-Changin'

Postcrossing card from Russia (March 2019)
Desk clock by Fabergé, from the Peterhof Museum

 Postcrossing card from Poland (June 2018)

A clock from a Museum of History in Prague

 Postcrossing card from Germany (September 2018)

Yes, it's that time of year again... As in putting one's body clock out of order, and making sure that one has remembered to change every other clock and device in the house. Some of them take care of themselves nowadays, but that doesn't really make it any easier to remember the ones that don't. There always seems to be at least one I've forgotten. And if I haven't forgotten that I should do it, I've forgotten how to. (I actually thought of the camera this morning, only to discover that I don't remember where to find the date-and-time setting on that. So I'll need to find the manual first...)

My inner body clock is always the hardest to convince, though. (Surely it cannot be lunchtime already? I'm not hungry! Or bedtime when I'm still wide awake... Or time to get out of bed, when I just fell asleep? etc)

A piece of Good News (?) the other day was that the EU has now decided that all this nonsense about changing clocks back and forth really has to stop! Er... Wait a moment... Not immediately, of course... And let's not decide if the clocks should be stopped on winter or summer time; but let each country continue to argue about that for another couple of years... Maybe in 2021 we'll be ready for a whole new confusing European time zone system, with each country choosing its own time... (Or maybe we'll find we aren't, in which case we'll postpone, or decide something else...)

Lots of opinion polls being made at the moment, of course - and probably more to come, until a final decision is reached! I think I'd cast my vote on keeping "normal" time (i.e. "winter" time). But I guess "summer" time all year round would be ok as well. I just wish they'd stop meddling with it back and forth...

 Old sun dial at Algutsrum Church, Öland (2018)
(my own photo)

...

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin’
And the first one now will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’ 

Bob Dylan - The Times They Are A-Changin'

(full lyrics here)

Visiting the Book Fair

A local book fair at the end of March seems to be on the way of becoming a tradition in Borås. This was the third year in a row. I blogged about the first back in 2017. I bought two books on that occasion. Last year it seems I did not blog about it, but I did pop in at the book fair then too, and bought one book. This year, I came home with three! 

One of them was given away for free - an offer hard to resist...  (That's the one with "Sarajevo" in the title.) 

One is about a tragedy that the author discovered in her own family history, and decided to research and write about. (I have not read it yet but the cover says it's the story of a woman who murdered her children - back in 1929.) I was intrigued by it because it reminded me of things I've been meaning to perhaps try to continue looking into myself, related to my own family history. Nothing as drastic as murder; and not likely to result in a book. But, as I said to the author while chatting briefly to her about hers, while buying it: Sometimes one does comes across bits and pieces here and there that makes one wish that someone had written the full story. 

The third one is the first in a 'cozy crime' series that escaped my attention until now. One of the rather many such series set in an otherwise rather idyllic small Swedish Town. In this series, the scene is Hjo, such a small town on the west coast of Lake Vättern, in the province of Västergötland (the same province where I live). And as it happens, Hjo is one of the towns that my brother and I visited on our tour around Lake Vättern two summers ago. I resisted the temptation to buy the whole series (five books so far) but I did buy the first one, and am enjoying reading it now. If nothing else, it's fun to read a book where one can call to mind quite a few flashbacks from one's own memories of what the place looks like. Here's a shortcut to one of my blog posts from Hjo from 2017. (To find even more, look up September 2017 in the Archive in the sidebar of my blog.)

I also attended a lecture by a well-known Swedish-Finnish author, Susanna Alakoski (link to Wiki article in English). One of the very many who moved to Sweden from Finland back in the 1960s, in her early childhood; the parents to work and the children just having to "jump right into it", going to Swedish school and learning Swedish etc without much special introduction for immigrants back in those days. I had several classmates from Finland throughout my school years. Children pick up language and dialects very quickly. Harder for their parents! With Susanna Alakoski (having come here in early childhood) you'd never guess now except for her Finnish surname that she is of Finnish origin. But in her lecture she talked a bit about these things - language, immigration, integration, identity etc; comparing the situation back then (1960s, with immigrants coming here from Finland + eastern and southern Europe, to work), and today (with immigrants coming from "all over the world", lots of different backgrounds, and many as refugees). Some interesting observations and thoughts, well worth considering. I'm also looking forward to reading her next book which she said will be published in the autumn and will be the first in a series that involves the Swedish textile industry. So just now she was in Borås to do some research. (As some of you know, if you've been following my blog for a while, Borås is an old textile industry town, and we also have a Textile Museum and a Textile College.)

Don't Lose Your Head

After a couple of days of mixed rain/snow in the air, today was a bit more spring-like, even if still chilly. Wearing a knitted hat on your head is still a good idea... But when my eye spotted this market stall display, I could not quite decide whether to see it as funny or creepy! (...so I took a photo...)

When I got back home, I posted the photo on Facebook - and was asked to 'tag' eight of the heads as friends! Still borderline between funny and creepy! (Why only those eight, they did not explain...)

Going on to read some other FB posts, I had one from a language program on Swedish Radio which I follow. They were asking for suggestions and questions for a future program about expressions including body parts. For some reason (have a guess!) ... what came up first in my mind was (the Swedish equivalent of) "lose your head"... So now I'm wondering why we say that, and how long we've been saying it (if perhaps it goes back to the days when people were literally beheaded?), and if it's a common expression in other languages as well. I do think I've heard "den Kopf verlieren" in German too. As for the other languages I've been digging into, I haven't really dug deep enough yet to find any lost heads... 

And writing that, it suddenly also strikes me that in the book I'm (re-)reading at the moment, there are a lot of heads and skulls as well - and not all of them attached to their bodies. The Janus Stone by Elly Griffiths (2nd in the Ruth Galloway series - cf my recent book review of The Stone Circle, 11th in the same series). (Janus was a Roman god,  usually depicted as having two faces, looking to the future and to the past, and the god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways etc.)

Now this is getting creepy... I'd better stop while I'm ahead... ;)