A year in whatnow?

October 10, 2021 ~ janeishly ~ 2 Comments

Back in the days when I used to meet new people – or indeed people of any kind other than supermarket checkout operators – once we’d gone beyond the initial phase of the conversation they’d often ask me why I live in Sweden. For some reason, the other end of my peripatetic existence, in rural France, never seems to attract so much comment!

What’s perhaps more peculiar is that I don’t actually have a simple answer. I mean, now I can say that I’m happy with the Swedes’ approach to the pandemic, and shortly before that I could, and frequently did, bang on and on about how grateful I am to have been plucked from the slobbering jaws of Brexit by Migrationsverket.

But it’s hard to say exactly what it is about Sweden that makes it feel like home. The people tend to be a bit stand-offish, the grey bit of winter goes on far too long even in the far south, the food is execrable, they’re more than a touch racist and their habit of mixing light – and even heavy – industry with residential and historical construction has resulted in some horrifying juxtapositions (my ‘favourite’ example of this is the probably 11th century castle in the pretty Baltic Sea town of Åhus. Google “Åhus castle” then use StreetView on the red marker for the full effect – it really is worth those few minutes’ effort).

And yet… it is home. Partly because that’s where most of my friends are, despite the stand-offishness, and I suppose partly because when Swedes do technology it generally works, unlike the French version. In Sweden you really do feel like you’re in the 21st century. At least, you do in the new bits of the towns. Out in the sticks, not so much.

Anyway, this is all a very long-winded way of saying that I recently re-read a book I edited a few years back which tells the story of two Brits moving to rural Sweden. And it reminded me what it is I enjoy about being in Sweden.

Red Swedish farmhouse in the background, mossy wall with rusted horseshoe in the foreground. — Sweden is a lot scruffier than you’d expect!

“A Year in Kronoberg” is, of course, modelled along the same lines as Peter Mayle’s “A Year in Provence”. Each chapter relates the events of a particular month, from the snows of January to… well, the snows of December. But in between are descriptions of what it’s really like to live in Sweden. Not in the cosmopolitan cities of Gothenburg and Stockholm, but a small village in the rural south.

How do the Swedes cope with snow? Are they really all blond-haired and blue-eyed and obsessed with fika? Are there moose everywhere, and do they actually get drunk from eating apples? And is it true that you can’t buy alcohol in Sweden? As the seasons change and the two Brits become increasingly Swenglish, we get answers to all of these questions, together with many others.

We meet a variety of the colourful characters who really do seem to be everywhere in rural Sweden, from beautiful Carina who works in the village shop to Olof the plumber and his terrible jokes, encounter huge Vikings and their even more enormous tractors, learn how to pronounce “Växjö”, discover the Swedish obsessions with sheds, ice-cream and hotdogs, and find out why you should never get excited about a Swedish history trail – or go swimming outdoors after mid-August.

In other words, if you want to know the truth about living in Sweden, you should read this charming, light-hearted and humorously informative book.

You can buy it here.

In the village

July 2, 2019July 1, 2019 ~ janeishly ~ 2 Comments

I remember seeing this prompt and wondering whether to make this piece a follow up to Cloud Dancing (I was rather taken with the character of Layla in that one and I’m pretty sure she’s going to come back at some point). But in the end I went for something a bit more non-fictiony. Thinking about it, I suppose this is, once again, a comment on the stupidity of Brexit.

It’s barely a hamlet; three large roundhouses and a collection of smaller buildings of various types – granaries, a shelter for the pigs and another for the goats although they keep eating it and it makes a lot of extra work. But a sickly goat is an unhappy goat, and unhappy goats give little milk. So they rebuild it every time, and the goats look at them sideways with their strange eyes and both parties know who’s going to win.

It smells of woodsmoke and tanning leather and baked pottery and animal and human dung and food. And sometimes something sharper, like mead or beer.

There are sounds of contentment and minor squabbles and effort from both the human and animal inhabitants, and beyond them the birds and the wind in the trees. It’s not a bad place to live, on the whole.

***

It’s a smallish village, 20 houses around a green and a collection of larger buildings of various types – barns, the church, the inn, the manor house. The lord’s not a bad sort, really – he keeps the peace with an even hand and make sure everyone’s alright, organising things so that widows and orphans find food and shelter and self-respect, and if possible another man to take them on. Because the women work hard and look after the children, but it takes a man to run a holding so he can pay his tithe to his lord.

It smells of woodsmoke and horses and human and animal manure, and on Sundays the incense from the church and every day of good bread baking and the iron being shaped in the smithy.

There are sounds of contentment and minor squabbles and effort from both the human and animal inhabitants, and the tolling of the bell, and beyond that the birds and the wind in the trees. It’s not a bad place to live, on the whole.

***

It’s a big village, almost a small town. Around the old village centre with the church and the green and the pub there are red brick houses from the 18th and 19th centuries, solid characterful dwellings with moss-grown walls and pretty gardens. And beyond them there are the newer houses; poor, cramped things on winding cul-de-sacs infested by cars and with red block paving and trampolines instead of gardens.

Nobody really works in the village any more – there used to be a school, but that shut down years ago and the post office went the same way last September. The church is inhabited by a glass designer from Cambridge who sells his work direct to galleries in London, and nobody from the village has been inside since he moved in five years ago.

It smells of car exhaust and fabric softener and fertiliser.

All you can hear, all day and for much of the night, is cars. They creep along the narrow country roads like turtles, rounded and shiny and completely unsuited to their environment. Most of the trees have long since been cut down to make space for intensive farming, and the birds went with them. It’s like hell on Earth, on the whole.

Things that make me go “Ooh…”

November 14, 2018November 14, 2018 ~ janeishly ~ Leave a comment

On Sunday, I visited Mont St Michel (yes, again – that’s the second time this year!). This time, it was with a translator colleague for a guided tour. When we arrived at the car park, it was absolutely pouring down, but by the time we’d got across the causeway and up to the abbey, where we had to collect our tickets, it had pretty much stopped. However, the glum face of our extremely serious guide more than made up for the lack of rain.

Mont St Michel - view from the abbey roof

But it only took a few moments of his introductory speech for us to realise this was just part of a running joke that continued throughout the entire two hours of the tour. And it turns out that François Saint-James is as much of an institution as the site he knows so well.

As he took us right up to the roof of the abbey and deep into the crypts beneath it, he would periodically offer us the choice of visiting a part of the abbey inaccessible to the majority of visitors… or going straight to the shop. He also had some extremely forthright views on the superiority of Normans over Bretons, and which crêperies on the island were worth patronising (answer – there’s only one that actually prepares the crêpes fresh).

Mont St Michel - flying buttresses — The lacework flying buttress at the very top is in fact a bridge

The tour as a whole was fantastic and highly recommended – you get to see some really interesting things, you get to cross the extremely fragile lacework stone bridge disguised as a flying buttress that leads to the roof, you learn fascinating facts about the abbey (normally involving bits of it collapsing. “One collapse every hundred years. Last collapse 1811. Keep together”, said Mr. Saint-James)… but the things that really made an impact on me were less obvious.

The first was that you can visit the second church to be built on the site, Notre-Dâme Sous-Terre. This was once a normal roofed building, dating right back to 966, and forgotten for many centuries after the vast structure above it was constructed, which is impressive enough in itself. But when they excavated behind the double altars, they found a wall from the original church on the site – constructed in 709 by Saint Aubert. And if you go on this tour, you can touch the stones of this wall! Maybe this wouldn’t do anything for you, but I trained as an archaeologist, and to me there’s nothing quite as exciting as being able to put yourself in the place of the original inhabitants of a site.

My second spine tingling moment was in the monk’s refectory, where our guide demonstrated how the acoustics didn’t work for normal speech, but that they did for a kind of chanted speech id (there’s a word for this, but neither my colleague Nelia nor I can remember it!). He read a short section of the Benedictine rules – as would have been done during every meal the monks ate there – and everyone in the huge room turned to listen as his voice effortlessly cut through the background noise, like a beam of warm, magical light.

And the third moment, which actually came at the very start of the tour, was listening to the bell being rung in the abbey. For 11 minutes. At 11 am, on the 11th day of the 11th month…

If you get a chance to do this particular tour (assuming you speak French, of course), it’s definitely worth doing. I think you’d have to do it several times before you took in all the information and sights that flood over you as you’re marched at top speed around the abbey, and it only cost 13€, which is just 3€ more than the standard, unguided entrance fee – and you effectively get that included in the price too!

We’d both seen the abbey before so we decided not to go back and have a further look this time – and also by this time we needed coffee. So we went down into the town and headed for a crêperie I’d visited last time I was there. We drank our coffee, and when we tried to pay the owner refused, saying that it was on him because it was his last day open before the winter break. So all in all, we had a really great day out!

And of course I took some photos (all of the ones in this post, in fact) with my new camera, the Yashica Y35 too.

Mont St Michel - view from the cloisters

Mont St Michel - the light of the archangel

Yashica Y35 camera – first pics

November 13, 2018November 13, 2018 ~ janeishly ~ 2 Comments

A few days ago I finally received the Yashica Y35 camera I’d backed on Kickstarter more than a year ago.

This is a strange gadget that looks like a traditional film camera, into which you insert plastic “digifilm” cartridges to obtain different effects. The ones I ordered were as follows:

Black and white (of course!)
200 ISO
1600 ISO
6×6
Yashica blue
In my fancy (a kind of 1970s colour effect, on which more below)

You could also order a fancy holder for your cartridges but they were rather pricey and in any case I have a couple of camera bags that these would normally fit in. However, I don’t have them with me at present, but I do have a spare (sealable!) plastic bag courtesy of an extremely rude woman at Southend Airport, so that’s what I’m carrying them in.

I gather the camera has had some pretty negative reviews, but other than a couple of slightly questionable choices in terms of design/build quality, it does exactly what I expected – it’s a cheapish, fun camera that makes you think differently about taking photos.

Given that my other cameras are a couple of Nikon 1 S1s and a 1982 Polaroid, I’m not exactly a typical gear head when it comes to camera equipment, so I think this fits pretty well with my photography style.

I took a couple of shots in the house (including the inevitable shadow selfie):

YASHICA - digiFilm in my fancy

Then I went out on Friday to a nearby ruined castle and took a few test shots to try out the different “films”:

YASHICA - digiFilm in my fancy YASHICA - digiFilm YASHICA blue YASHICA - digiFilm 1600

All of these were taken with the “in my fancy” digifilm, except for the last two, which were taken with the “blue” and 1600 ISO cartridges.

I’m pretty happy with these, I have to say. Yes, I could have obtained the same effects by mucking about with stuff in Lightroom and/or Photoshop, but I don’t do post-processing as a rule – and in any case I’d much rather have random effects created by the camera.

I’m not sure how much use I’ll get from all of the digifilms, but so far I’d say that this is a camera I’m likely to use quite a lot. It’s a neat enough size to fit in my handbag and seems to react reasonably quickly. And I’m used to shooting with a prime lens on my main camera, so the lack of zoom isn’t an issue either (I’m guessing this is throwing some users). In fact until I sat down to write this post I hadn’t even noticed it didn’t have one!

In fact I’ve used it since on a visit to another ancient monument. But that’s another story…