Today, a certain desperation set in. I realized with alarm that I am already in the middle of my stay in Sweden! I have written very little of my script! I have not visited neither Stockholm nor Uppsala! I did not meet almost any Swedish people! I did not discover the secrets of the Scandinavian soul! I have just wasted all my precious time just walking around this desert island, taking photographs of frozen landscapes and feeding carrots to horses and cows, annoying the few remaining readers with random details of my daily walks.
Besides, the other day, Anna, the organizer of the arts space here, forgot her expensive Macbook computer on the bus to Stockholm, and she thought it was lost forever, but later that same night someone called her saying he had found it, and she got it back — so I thought about writing a paean to the honesty and kindness of the Swedish people. However, as soon as she got back at Björkö, she found out that the hard drive had actually been wiped out, and all its contents copied somewhere else, so I may need to review a bit that idea about honesty… Right now the police is involved and we’ll find out what happened exactly maybe next week.
To top it off, we ended the day watching Bergman’s “The Passion of Anna”, which I hadn’t seen but perhaps wasn’t the best choice for the night — a very bleak film even for Bergman standards about people living in isolation in a small island in Sweden during winter and slowly going mad… I don’t know, but I think it might even have been filmed around here…
I could continue writing, but all I would be able to write today would probably be something about Nordic melancholia and why Nordic countries are usually considered in polls among the happiest in the world but, paradoxically, at the same time they used to have one of the highest suicide rates in the world (to be fair, I don’t know if it is true anymore, I think they’ve been surpassed by Japan).
But I wanted to end on a more cheerful and hopeful note, so today there was a wonderful sunset here with amazing red and purple colours, and the day itself was quite beautiful, and I had a nice walk, and now I am having a nice cup of tea with arraksbollar, and there will be even nicer things coming up soon.
