Frozen hair

Finally! Success! After so many attempts and failures, I have been to the butcher in Trollbäcken. And not only have I been, it was open, and I bought a week’s worth of meat. Triumphantly, I then headed to Ica to complete my day’s shopping.

Mind you, I still managed to get there early. As I reached the underpass it was still ten minutes before opening. Rather than walk off in disgust (like last week) I decided to go and walk on a lake.

Not that I meant to actually walk on it.

From a small access road, I spotted a person skiing across the lake in the distance, so I went down to, what would be in warmer times, the water’s edge. I was intrigued by the bumps in the snow that can be seen in the photo above. They are mooring buoys, caught in the ice and covered with snow.

The lake is Drevviken. And I had accidentally wandered out onto it. Not that that was a problem. As the above photo shows, quite a few people had already been there before me.

A bigger problem on a day when the temperature was around -11° is going out with wet hair. Not that I did that but my wife did.

When she returned from walking the dogs in the morning, she showed me her frozen strands. It was quite odd and a very valuable lesson: Don’t wash your hair before leaving the house. Fortunately it wasn’t at the snappable stage, it was just a bit solid.

But, back at the shops…

…I rolled my excessively heavy and meat bulging trolley back up to the bus stop. Lifting it onto the bus was a bit of an effort, but I managed to sit for the five minute trip, given there wasn’t a stroller in the stroller spot.

Back at the house, I settled down to do research in the kitchen while Mirinda worked in the lounge, looking out over the snowy forest landscape. Not that it snowed. The sky was beautifully blue and the ice crystals were sparkly. It was just very cold.

Fortunately, Dicte was back on Netflix, so we could finish watching the episode which had been so rudely interrupted last night when the programme, inexplicably, vanished off the service mid-episode.

My prediction that her father would not tell her the very important thing he had to tell her came true. Though there is a missing letter which might still hold the answer.

Then, at 9pm, I logged onto Zoom to watch tonight’s WFA webinar. It was about the defeat at Loos and presented by Battle field tour guide, Julian Whippy.

I learned about the folly of entering a battle with inadequate artillery and how useless chlorine gas can be when there’s the slightest bit of wind or a bowl in the landscape. I also learned about a chap called Fritz Harber, someone I’d never heard of before tonight.

As well as developing chemical warfare for the Germans, he also received the Nobel Peace Prize in Chemistry for inventing a process which, these days, feeds half the world’s population. Which is ironic when, on one hand he invented a way to kill lots of people and, on the other, invented something which led to people surviving.

Haber’s life makes for a fascinating read. His Wikipedia entry is extraordinary.

Back at Loos, the webinar went over time somewhat and, as usual, there were lots of questions from the hundreds of viewers. It was a late night for me. But worth it.

Julian (top row left) isn’t actually in a dungeon. His Zoom background is a photo from a battlefield.