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Thankfully I wasn´ t there the last time, underlining the fact that a lifetime has passed since anything like this stained our continent.  Speechless is a popular way of expressing being overwhelmed by emotions.  I can´ t say I´ m speechless, just angry, disappointed and frustrated and realize there are few new words I could add to the torrent of condemnation from all corners of the world directed at Russia. 

Nice words, though it all seems so inadequate when people are dying in a European democracy just across the water from me. Inadequate it is of course, which is the evil calculation made by the megalomaniac in the Kremlin, that nobody will go to war and risk nuclear escalation in support of the Ukraine.  That makes sense to most Europeans, excepting perhaps the extremely bellicose.  In the short run all we can do is gnash our teeth and do what we can to help. In the long run we should do everything possible to ensure that this aggression, accompanied by disgusting political rhetoric and propaganda to justify it, does not go unpunished.  I think Germany needs to stop behaving like a reformed arsonist who refuses to lend out his garden hose as his neighbour´ s house burns down, with the motivation that he´ s done with all that; but if asked, he might consider calling the fire brigade.  Sweden has a history of looking the other way which was brutally brought to mind by her Prime Minister, Magdalena Andersson being caught with her knickers down, when she couldn´ t say whether it was an invasion or not, until someone defined the word for her.  Since then I suppose she´ s looked it up in a dictionary, as soon afterwards she was on her way to have a chat with Jens.  Sweden is after all an associate member of NATO.  Not being a member is a risky but considering public opinion, political expedient, which now has egg on its face.

There is hope, highlighted by almost universal condemnation, barring China which surprises no one.  Despite individual politicians squirming in their political and oh so vital democratic straight-jackets, there appears to be a united European front.

It´ s not all about politicians though. We have a global economy, the internet, social media, a world of international sporting events, a system of international travel and if we as individuals, all make use of whatever tiny possibility we have to exert influence on any of them to boycott Russia, then we will have done our bit. #StopPutin

I´ m beginning to think that following the countless news flashes on my mobile phone is offering me more entertainment than watching the latest series on Netflix; with being part of the story adding a little spice. The lengthiest, still going strong news series has been climate change but even Brexit and Covid have been around for quite a while. Trump´´ s news value has dropped dramatically and the whole Republican show has now, for most of us in Europe anyway, morphed into a never-ending Coronation Street style nonentity.

Russia and the Ukraine crisis are newcomers in the field, feeding on over 100 years of history. The retake of the once popular Soviet Republics series now featuring Vladimir Putin in the leading role has moved to primetime news with Putin asking some very difficult questions.

”My friend said you are threatening my country!”

”Most certainly not,” is the reply.

”Are you calling my friend a liar?”

With a fight picking dialogue like that you might think backing down is the best answer until you remember your history and then wonder if anyone else does. 

We won´ t have to wait too much longer though, as things seem to be coming to a head but if it all comes to nothing and stays with the ´ my dad is bigger than your dad` type of diplomacy then Covid and climate change will once again be top of the news charts in 2022. 

Brexit, yes what about Brexit? The word banned by Johnson but like him won´ t go away, makes me think of a one-time graffiti many years ago in a pub gents. ”While you are reading this, you are pissing on your boots.”  Of little concern to anyone, other than the owner of the boots that is.

It´s going to be another interesting year.

A rather depressing article in today´ s (20th November) Svenska Dagbladet where three Swedish female celebrities lament getting old. The women are not only struggling with their mirror images brutally reminding them of their journey through life but also with a diminishing sense of  importance, based on eye catching good looks claiming presence in any room withering away. Their story is sad enough for me to refrain from twisting any knives in that wound, with the wound in itself being more than growing old and dying.

No life without death as the saying goes although when learning about the birds and bees at school, the latter is conveniently played down. As time goes by the phrase becomes less abstract with more focus on the rather more inconvenient part of living which for most of us is a grudgingly accepted price to pay. 

What seems to be less accepted is the view that life is a journey with no cherry picking to be had. Rich or poor we experience much the same discomfort albeit in varying degrees of comfort. 

Greying hair, wrinkles, weakening muscles, weakening eyesight, weakening hearing, breasts or scrotums surrendering to gravity are all part and parcel of our lives and for the sake of our mental health need to be acknowleged and dealt with as such. 

No easy matter but to stress my point I feel there is an argument for being as unashamedly incontinent in old age as in infancy. 

The side effects of growing old may be taken as preparatory although I no longer need these symptoms as hints of when and what is to come as arithmetic in conjunction with statistics complemented by various health warnings attributed to a number of my habits are sufficient.

I too glance in the mirror at times and I see me….. and it´ s looking good.

Living at the top of a building in a two storied apartment with a glazed in roof terrace overlooking Västerås harbour as well as a large section of the adjoining waters is difficult to find fault with. Not to mention the absence of virtually any motorised traffic thus maintaining a calm, unusual in an area so close to the centre of the town.

On most days of the year the only outstanding sounds to be heard are the birds, not even a  Ryanair flight from Alicante or London, seen but not heard as it disappears in the distance behind the trees to land at Västerås airport a few miles away. Idyllic is the word and even though the rest of the world is only 7 floors down it is an existance that could match any country retreat deep in the woods. 

Apart from the occasional very popular Zumba session on the quay during the summer months with music loud enough to upset some apparently, little is to be heard from a very popular harbour with several restaurants, bars and ice cream stalls. Getting upset is of course a very individual thing and should be respected if not necessarily acted upon. However complaining that a boat in the harbour is obstructing someone´ s view of the lake is perhaps a little too Monty Python to be taken seriously.

Living up in the sky so to speak entitles you to a bird´´ s eye view of the world and all that comes with it. For the most part the screeching of seagulls or a swarm of jackdaws darkening the sky and then hundreds of soft thuds as they land on the roof are on and off occurrences of shoulder shrugging consequence.

Not so with pigeons where the icing on the cake does nothing to enhance the idyll. Pigeons are intelligent creatures and although lazy, rather unskillful nest builders, they are also very attached to their ”homes”  Keeping them at bay therefore requires a permanent, well thought out response and we found that spikes attached at strategic locations kept them at arm´ s length. Arm´´ s length is the word as these birds are fully aware of our shortcomings as airborne predators and will completely ignore you while they go about their business of making sure the world never runs out of pigeons, when they´ re not icing the cake that is.

The emotionally closest we ever got to our friends in the sky was when a tern couple decided to make their nest in the corner of the roof adjacent to our terrace. At first a no-brainer that turned out to be rather the opposite. No sooner had the couple laid an egg than we became persona non grata. 

It wasn´ t just a case of angry stares but actual dive bombing attacks accompanied by gatling gun sound effects. For several weeks we felt like squatters in our own home surreptitiously watching a small bundle of fluff waddle around the terrace to finally grow into a beautiful, fully fledged tern. 

The indignity of being treated as a threat was exacerbated by us being almost as concerned as the parents that their chick should come to no harm. We were not even granted being party to the epilogue as one fine morning the nest was empty.

Our family of summer guests had departed, to who knows where?

Having decided to leave my publisher´s representative job for McGraw Hill in Germany, Gunilla and I moved to the small town of Arboga. Extensive travelling from a home in Sweden for one publisher to be replaced by extensive travelling from a home in Germany for another publisher was somewhat of a status quo for me and definitely not an improvement for Gunilla. A newly born added to the pressure of getting things right. Gunilla had done some of her student teacher training at a school in Arboga so we were quite familiar with what to expect when she got her first teaching job in a village school close by. Looking back I am always overwhelmed as to how decision making never seemed to cause us much of a headache. As I do not consider myself a reckless person I suppose it will have to be put down to ”being young”

Now the boot was on the other foot, with me a newly baked dad out of a job in a foreign country. Problems are there to be solved, not least self inflicted ones. It didn´ t bother me at all, well at least not until I actually had to start solving them. Problem number one was that I suddenly found myself in charge of a six month old baby. Not just for a few minutes of coochie coo and tickling under the chin before handing her back to Mummy but for most of a working day. Talk about a crash course in how to be a Mummy. (These days it´ s called how to be a parent) I was a complete novice and Gunilla had a thing or two to say about the way I handled things. Number 1 (girls two and three were to become later additions to the family) and I both survived however. I say both because apart from the more conventional chores of baby care I had to deal with behavior normally associated with BamBam. Never turn your back or something will come crashing down, drawers will be emptied on the floor or the dog will get his tail pulled. If there had been such a thing as a baby crawling competition I would have entered her at the drop of a hat. Needless to say I was completely exhausted by the time Gunilla came home. To add insult to injury I distinctly remember her once asking me, ”is that what you do all day, sit and stare at the child?”  I think I just gave a tired shrug and explained that I had actually taken her for a push chair ride in the park together with all the other mothers. (Things would change but in 1975 I was definitely a pioneer in the field)

Problem number two was me being out of a job. As Gunilla was making enough money for both of us, problem number two would therefore perhaps not have been of such importance had it not been for problem number one, at least as far as I was concerned. Even if Dads at home were still considered a bit freaky, two working parents was not unusual even in the mid 1970s, so for me to start looking for a job would hardly have been frowned upon.

No sooner said than done found me sitting in front of a careers advisor at the local employment agency. I had filled in a form with a list of previous experience backed up by a knowledge of four languages, two fluent and two wobbly ones with Swedish as one of the latter. His exact words have eroded over the years but were to the tune of, ”sorry, but we have no jobs available to match your qualifications.” This didn´ t come as too much of a surprise to me and I explained to him as such, adding that I was prepared to accept any sort of job, like working in a council parks department of which I had previous experience. It soon all boiled down to him admitting he had no jobs available at all. To this day I am not sure whether he didn´ t like the cut of my jib, didn´ t actually have anything to offer or had fixed a job for himself that he couldn´ t handle. That afternoon my suspicions were confirmed although I was no closer to identifying the reason. I had invested in a copy of the local newspaper and finding an advertisement looking for workers at the local paper mill had called them immediately. After a quick interview that same afternoon I found myself in work.

I have never really liked factories or at least the kind that spring to mind at the mention of the word but this paper mill was of a different calibre. My job as it turned out was raw labour and apart from having to adjust to a shift system I was far from unhappy. 

Basically all I had to do was stand in front of what can best be described as a gigantic automatic toilet roll dispenser where the paper is unravelled and automatically cut into large sheets and deposited in front of me to be picked up at the correct batch size and placed in a criss cross fashion onto a nearby pallet. Maybe I should mention that each batch weighing anywhere between 10-20 kg depending on the order, was to be aired by holding it up and compressing the sides allowing air to enter between the sheets. 

This is the closest I have ever been to what nowadays is called a workout. Mine was not glamourous but I was getting paid and the results would easily have matched any present day bench-presser.

As a teenager I ploughed through many of the dystopian tales popular at the time, George Orwell´s 1984, and Animal Farm, Aldous Huxley´s Brave New World, Ray Bradbury´s Fahrenheit 451 as well as a few others.  I was not unaware that, scary as they were, none of these were completely unrealistic visions of a troubled future. Recent history might suggest that mankind would learn a lesson  and that it would take generations of practised amnesia before the likes of George Orwell´s  et al characters once again entered the world´s stage.

Looking back over the past ten years I was obviously mistaken. A whole lifetime of things that went wrong could not match the events of the past decade. The most far reaching of these of course is Covid 19, bouncing us back to the times when lepers rang a bell shouting, ”unclean, unclean” to warn others of a dangerous disease and risk of infection. Despite a global panic and its consequences the virus will eventually be mastered and boxed in by science like so many other diseases threatening human beings.

Not so with politics, never a genre for choir boys uncomfortable with white lies, but now with politicians like America´s Trump and the UK´s Johnson quite prepared to view truths and untruths as interchangeable at will. Hannah Arendt has a few things to say about that in ”The Origins of Totalitarianism.”  Dividing people into us and them, then demonising the latter to ride on a wave of political popularity is as criminal as it is cynical. Unfortunately history shows us that it is all too often successful.

Somebody once said, ”when fascism comes to America it will be carrying a bible and be wrapped in a flag.”  Of course there are various political recipes for this, with differing flavours but this quote serves well as a base ingredient for an otherwise unsavoury dish.

An article in my daily newspaper or maybe I should say my daily news1sand0s reported on the EU´s reluctance to forward 2,5 billion Euros to Malopolskie, a self declared LGBT free region in Poland, requiring that support for LGBT discrimination in the region be withdrawn. Not an unreasonable demand considering that the money comes from taxpayers in the EU with a slightly less backward approach to the rights of the LGBT community.

The thing that struck me the most in this article was a quote from a sermon given by the Archbishop of Krakow, Marek Jedraszewski where his rhetorical question is, ”should we not stand firm and defend our honour and true freedom.”

”True freedom,” according to the Archbishop would be denying others their equal rights in the name of honour.

Without too much effort I can think of a number of people apart from George Orwell who could sue the Archbishop for plagiarism. 

Luckily for the Archbishop and for the rest of us, they are all dead.

”Everbody certainly knows that Boris Johnson lies,” writes Charlotta Buxton in todays Swedish national newspaper Svenska Dagbladet (con) and goes on to list a number of incidents. Amongst these getting fired from the Times for making up a quote and later getting fired from a top political appointment for lying about an extra marital affair.

Over the last week or so a video clip put together by Peter Stefanovic and racking up an incredible 28 million or more views on social media shows Johnson repeatedly lying at the despatch box. Yesterday (23/7) Dawn Butler, Labour MP for Brent was asked to leave the House of Commons for the rest of the day when she would not retract a statement accusing the Prime Minister of lying to the House, ”over and over again.” 

Strange as it may seem, telling the truth in Parliament can be more frowned upon than dishonesty.  Rules are rules and even in this case I assume them to be based on some form of logic. Apparently though it all comes down to the way you swing it, as when Dennis Skinner was once asked to retract the statement, ”half the Tory members opposite are crooks.”  He responded with, OK, half the Tory members aren´t crooks.”  

Nevertheless, breach of rules or no, Dawn Butler deserves acknowledgement for her courage in speaking out. 

It´s not every day you get to read articles in SvD critical of the UK´s conservative government and its prime minister albeit with the understatement of the year, ”maybe he isn´t always completely honest….”  Perhaps the time has come to realize that the political likes of Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson do little to further conservative politics not to mention his trashing of a country´s reputation and jeopardizing its very existance. 

Contrary to parliamentary rules of conduct the naked emperor is exposed in the House of Commons by a black female MP telling everybody what they already know, the Prime Minister of the UK is a liar. 

How long can this go on for?

`Those the Gods love die young` is a saying dating to classical Greek as far back as the 3rd Century BC. The intrinsic meaning of this being the belief in an after life coupled to a desire of the gods to swiftly re-introduce select humans to godly domains. 

Of course not being totally ignorant of the classics even in younger years, I was aware of this proverb and having put a somewhat fatalistic twist to my own interpretation of it made driving my beautiful, red Ford Cortina GT to its limits slightly more relaxing. 

What was new to me was that being a favourite of the Gods involved a happy reunion rather than my interpretation which was more on a par with being spared the trauma of old age. Having reached the ripe old age of 74, apart from a number of irritating, worse for wear things that need to be addressed I have to admit that so far (touches wood) nothing seriously negative has materialised to warrant any fondness directed toward me in my youth by the Gods.  Add some 40 odd years (I matured late in life) of responsible life including work, travel, family, children, grandchildren, being cherished by the Gods seems to pale somewhat.

In fact quite so; age may be fraught with aches and pains but it brings with it a wisdom of sorts. I say sorts  because wisdom still requires an ability to analyse and in the absence of analytical skills is perhaps better filed under the heading experience.Whatever, ”done that been there” pops up more frequently as the years pass.

As a teenager I had a number of pretty close calls driving and I would have wholeheartedly agreed that the Gods did not love me when insufficient cash had resulted in my having to choose a Ford Cortina GT instead of the much faster Lotus Cortina.

 As yet I have not experienced the benefits of an after life in divine company and until I do, if ever, I find myself quite content with second best.

”That´ll be sixpence ha´penny luv,” said the lady behind the counter in the corner shop as she handed me my bag of sweets. Not that I actually remember any specific purchase of sweets at that age although there must have been quite a few. I would most likely have given her a shilling and received five and a halfpence in return. Not rocket science once you realise that there were twelve pence to a shilling and quite graspable even for an eight year old. 

Taking it a step further the arithmetic becomes slightly more demanding when two items, each with a price tag of 14s 10d (fourteen shillings and ten pence) are to be paid for.  The total cost for these two items is one pound nine shillings and eight pence (£1 9s 8d). I should add that mobile phones as well as electronic calculators were not yet invented, the latter not suitable for this system of currency anyway. To arrive at the correct total it must be remembered that there were twenty shillings to a pound and twelve pence to a shilling. So, ten pence + ten pence = twenty pence which works out at one shilling and eight pence (1s 8d). Fourteen shillings + fourteen shillings = twenty eight shillings which gives you one pound and eight shillings (£1 and 8s). Add the two together and bingo you get one pound nine shillings and eight pence (£1 9s 8d). Easy peasy!

In today´s world pound, shillings and pence come across as more of a nightmare than anything else 

 The `£´ which was the equivalent to 20 shillings or 240 pence, stands for libra the latin word for pound. The `s´ which was the equivalent to 12 pence stands for shilling from scilling a German coin first introduced to 15th Century England by Henry Vll. Finally the `d´ stands for denarius or penny derived from the Carolinguan denarius, a coin spread throughout western Europe under the reign of Charlemagne. Believe it or not there is method to this madness albeit historical. Silver pennies called sceattas (origin Friesland) were the  main currency in Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and 240 pieces of these would be the equivalent of one pound in weight, in case you were wondering why there were 240d to a £1.

The UK moved on to the metric system exactly 50 years ago and I would like to think that there are few regrets.  However in this day and age of Brexit Britain it might not come as a surprise that there are actually people suggesting a return to not only this system for currency but also the re-introduction of imperial weights and measures. You know, where there are 16 ounces to a pound, 14 pounds to a stone, 12 inches to a foot and 3 feet to a yard and so on. 

Actually it does come as a surprise to me when I hear Brexiters argue the value in preserving English history.  As mentioned above it´s basically all about imports from Germany, France and Italy. The conclusion one might draw, if their quest is successful, would be to hope Brexiter´s  arithmetic is better than their grasp of history.