Author: Tom

A handy guide It is difficult, but not impossible. Sure, it is cold. Days are short. It can get lonely, especially if you are, like me, in a faraway region where there are no pubs, no bars, nor any kind of social life, or if you don’t practice any winter activity and don’t like much…

Just going back to that boring issue for a little moment I’ve been ranting like a crazy old man for almost two years against “lockdowns” and “vaccine passports”, and for the right to freedom of movement and to make your own health choices, in other words, to a life such as we had back in…

The Inuit supposedly have 50 different ways to describe snow. Do Swedes have 50 different ways of describing ice? The nearby lake is now completely frozen. It’s actually brackish water, as it partly mixes with water from the sea and so has some salinity content. I thought of going ice-skating one of these days, but…

There are many Scandinavian folktales about ghosts and witches. Mare, for instance, from where the word “nightmare” originates, is a type of evil witch or spirit who sits on people’s chests during the night and gives them bad dreams. Another interesting character is Pesta, a personification of death and pestilence in the shape of an…

The Scandinavian sea coast, especially in winter, is quite different from the ones I’m used to. I was born in Argentina. I grew up in Brazil. I lived in California and Sicily. To me, a coast means a beach with sand, sun, high waves, and lots of people including annoying sellers of all kinds of…

Dear Reader, I am right now somewhere in the island of Björkö, in Sweden. It is located to the northeast of Stockholm, about 2h40 min by bus (actually, one metro and two buses). I came from Germany, where I was before, by train. 16 hours. Except for not sleeping very much, and feeling very tired…

Ending an obsession I am travelling in Sweden and I won’t be posting so much about the “corona” issue these days. Instead, you will find here mostly a travelogue. In the end, my opinion about the whole “corona” thing didn’t change much since February 2020: just stop with the idea of using a pandemic to…

On vaccine passports, Solzhenitsyn and conspiracy theories Argentina has become the latest country in the world to adopt some kind of mandatory “vaccine passport”. I don’t know or care how it’s called, perhaps it has a different official name, but it is a vaccine passport. Some say I am a “conspiracy theorist” to point it…

I have a strange feeling of dejà vu… Happy New Year! But are we already in 2022, or have we gone back to 2020? Canada is now joining the “Lockdown 2022” club, where most European countries already are. At least in Quebec, from 31 December new strict restrictions were announced, with nightly curfews, prohibition of…