In a city of lakes, you’re never too far away from one. And this afternoon, we walked the girls to our closest. It’s called Långsjön (Skälsätra-Tutviken), which is Swedish for Long Lake. The ‘Skälsätra-Tutviken’ bit refers to the two residential areas it is between. Skälsätra is to the north while Tutviken is to the south.
As you can tell from the photo, the weather continues to be gloomy with the occasional misty rain but it’s not particularly cold. I feel this is an indication that snow is unlikely this year. This is an opinion shared by our two Stockholm acquaintances as well.
For me, most of the day was spent tidying up and doing washing. It’s rather nice having such a small house to clean. All round, the house, apart from the small shower and scary stairs (little more than a ladder with a bannister), is perfect for us. The downstairs is a circle – what we call a doughnut house – and nice and cosy. Very hygge.
People who are impressed by big screen TVs may find the one in the photo above quite satisfying but don’t be fooled. It’s not very thin, it isn’t very smart and I have to pull the power cord out then put it back in before using it because there’s something odd with the remote/TV relationship.
Mirinda went searching for a café and a hairdresser again. This time she tried Trollbäcken Centrum, which is just down the road; where our ICA is.
She didn’t mind the café she found but will keep looking for the perfect one. The hairdresser was a bit cheaper, but they still spent too long fiddling with her hair before coming to a price decision.
While today was, strictly speaking, a holiday, Mirinda spent a fair bit in meetings. They were important meetings and she’ll take off time in lieu so it’s okay and she managed to have an enjoyable morning.
I made Brazilian fish for dinner and it tasted almost the same. We decided it was the cod that tasted a bit bland. Usually, at Waitrose, the cod was Icelandic and, I assume, this cod is Swedish. I threw the packaging away before reading it so, who knows?
A lot of the fish at ICA is frozen and packed like the ice lollies we used have as kids.
You buy them in strips and cut off what you need. An excellent idea though fraught with danger if you mistake them for orange juice ice blocks.
Today, this happened
In 1960, Penguin Books was found not guilty of obscenity after publishing Lady Chatterley’s Lover. It was a test case and changed the arts in Britain forever. It also allowed people to decide what they found offensive rather than the government of old white men, deciding for them.
DH Lawrence was ready to publish the finished, unexpurgated version of his novel in 1928 but the world wasn’t ready for it. He wrote it in Florence and, at first, published a small run which was then banned. He tried to have it published in Italy but that didn’t work.
He tried the US and Britain. And Japan and Australia. No-one, it seems, was ready for written sex scenes and four letter words.
I guess the authorities were unaware of paintings and statues. Except for the Vatican, which banned the public from seeing the ‘rude’ Roman stuff at the Naples Archaeological Museum.
Surprisingly, it was deemed not obscene in the US a year before Britain. And funnily enough, not only the novel was banned in Australia. The transcript of the trial was also banned.
After the not guilty verdict was announced, Penguin sales of the novel immediately jumped to three million copies. I guess it’s true that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. I do wonder how many of those three million editions were actually read.
Unfortunately, Lawrence never saw his novel properly and legally published. He died in 1930. It was another 30 years before the world was, apparently, ready for his work.
