I've actually booked myself a vacation. Yay! I'm going to Oxford for the Barbara Pym Society's AGM, and have managed to get a week off from August 30th until September 7th. I went last year as well, and it's such a wonderfully Pymian experience that I simply can't miss it. Feels like a way to celebrate mum's memory as well, since she was the one ( Read more... )

Here I am again, almost five months later. Mum died on February 19th, she took her last breath at the hospital, with me and my sister by her side. Life became so much emptier when she left us. She never did regain consciousness after those last words to me in the living-room on the 18th of February - "Det blir bättre" - "det blir bättre".. it's mum ( Read more... )

This year's poetry quotation in the card  from mum for my birthday:

from "Autumnal" by Ernest Dowson

Pale amber sunlight falls across
The reddening October trees,
That hardly sway before a breeze
as soft as summer: summer's loss
seems little, dear! On days like these.

But where is the sun they promised us today? I started the day with some bubbly and ( Read more... )

I'm back in my kitchen again, and I'm currently having breakfast here with my mother. We managed to bring her down here for a few days of vacation. She had a good night's sleep for the first time in quite a while, no dad here to wake her every hour. The weather is lovely and springlike, and we're trying to sort out the last proböems in my kitchen. ( Read more... )

I'm baking Snoddas again, which is a kind of Swedish challah type of bread with egg and oil in the dough. The funny thing is that it's only in Gothenburg that it is called "Snoddas", you can't even find those kind of bread here in the south of Sweden. They have something like it in Stockholm, but it's called something else. I have no idea where the ( Read more... )

Feeling much better today, but stayed home with the parents most of the day. Watching After Henry with mum has been pretty charming. Why don't I work at Bygone Books? It stars Prunella Scales as Sarah, a middle-aged widow who shares a house with her mother and daughter. Sarah works at Bygone Books. The grandmother rules, she's fantastic, and ( Read more... )

Oh dear, where did the days go? Mum's visit is over, the wedding over and done with, the Judith Halberstam lecture attended yesterday, and then on top of it all I ended up with food poisoning tonight.

Best was mum's visit, so very nice to have her here for a few days, just hanging out and talking and not having to worry about all the things that ( Read more... )

After updating last night I actually got sick and spent some time hanging over the toilet bowl. Oh joy. Seems like I had swallowed some of the gargling medicine, not fun at all. Bleurk. Didn't help the cold either, even if I did go back to sleep afterwards. Throat hurts, but still have my voice, knock knock, so will be able to read the sonnet ( Read more... )

Today I visited my old grammar school (Swedish gymnasium), since I helped mum pack up her work-place and clean out her books there. She worked as a French and English teacher at Hvitfeldtska Gymnasiet for more than 30 years, and she had her last class last week. Now she's retired, and it felt pretty weird to be back, walking the corridors where I ( Read more... )

Oh Mum, you are so very much my mother *g*

Inside the card she had quoted Emily Brontë's following poem:

Fall, Leaves

Fall, leaves, fall, die flowers away;
Lengthen night and shorten day;
Every leaf speaks bliss to mee:
Fluttering from the autumn tree:

I shall smile when wreaths of snow
Blossom where the rose should grow;
I shall sing when night's decay
( Read more... )