Briareos H on 23/6/2022 at 16:08
I think food cultures deserves their own thread and I don't want to derail yours but I'll explain my snickering. As a foreigner to both, I've found a lot of good and bad food in both places. Both countries have amazing traditional farm products such as cheeses, meats and good locally grown vegetables although limited in range.
On the one hand I wholeheartedly agree that access to a variety of foreign foods is way more developed and turned outwards in Sweden, with a very lively scene of foreign restaurants and supermarkets, especially in Stockholm. I can find anything I want.
On the other hand when it comes to local adaptations of pizza or everyman foods, then I'm not sure I can decide who is better. "Traditional" Swedish sausages (from Isterband to falukorv to blodpudding) are just the worst sausages I've ever had, one of the nicest brands I can find at ICA is ironically for UK-style sausages (Taylors and Jones). As for Swedish pizza, it's the same fake pizza that you can find in every European country that is not Italy, but with an accent on particularly exotic variations (of course kebabpizza but also all the ones with fruits or curry). That being said I haven't tried pizza in the UK, perhaps it's worse. And then again, it also very easy to find good Neapolitan pizza in Stockholm.
hopper on 23/6/2022 at 22:55
Gray, I thoroughly enjoy reading about your nostalgia trip. It suddenly occurred to me how much we have in common - much of what you describe makes me nod in recognition and might as well have been about me. Like you, I'm from an industrial town of almost exactly the same size in the north of almost exactly the same country ;). We're close in age, and I also have two brothers, although I'm the youngest one. Your description of the lack of displays of empathy and affection in the family you grew up in could have been written by me, and I've been very conscious about being much more open with my own son as a direct result of that experience. Even the house I grew up in was built around the same time as yours. And we both went abroad, married and settled down in a foreign country.
I also know that strange feeling you get when you return after years of absence to a place you used to know very intimately. A peculiar mix of familiarity and strangeness, lots of impressions and feelings that kind of come rushing back after years of being kept in cold storage. Things you never used to think about when you lived there because they were just the way they always were, and you never had any reason to think about them at all. But then you return years later, and you notice these little things like you're seeing them for the first time, although they are exactly as you knew them, they never changed, but your experience did. Like how in the summer the evening sun keeps creeping northward while sinking ever so slowly hour after hour, without ever really setting below the horizon, which can mess with your feeling of time, at least in the first few days. Or how electricity and phone cables are strung on poles on every street instead of being underground, or how practically nobody ever puts up a fence or wall around their property.
But I must say that my experience with the food is rather different from yours, because the food here is much better and more varied than back home. I've read stories about pensioners living in Spain saying they miss nothing from home, except for the food. I can't get my head around it. How can you live in the second-best food country in Europe and miss Norwegian food? It boggles the mind. Some time ago, I came up with this idea of what I would say if somebody asked me to describe my home country in one sentence: "Many people visit there for the beautiful scenery - but nobody stays for the food!"
Gray on 24/6/2022 at 23:59
A word on the food issues above: the clue is in the thread title.
And now back to our scheduled programme.
:ahem:
In this part of the world, the weather is fickle at the best of times. It took me about a week for the weather to be decent enough for the next phase of my plan. To get on my bike, and ride it down, about 45 minutes, from the small town in the middle of nowhere, to the nowhere slightly outside of the nowhere of nowhere, where the old cottage was. This is where I spent all my summers as a boy. This is where my dad burned all his money. His forever project, yet unfinished. This is where we hated to go, because it meant carrying bricks and holding planks, and getting yelled at in Finnish curse words for not doing it right. All three of us brothers always said we'd never want to inherit this place, with all the memories of an enforced labour camp. But yet, now, my older brother owns it, and intends to keep it. And now that I'm old, I can see why.
It's a lovely spot. Granted, it's dead centre of the mosquito breeding grounds. It's slightly outside the edge of civilisation. For 11 months of the year, the weather is pretty shit. But for roughly 10 days a year, not in succession, it's almost rather nice. Sometimes. The cottage itself is still a death trap, but he intends to fix that. Eventually. At least twice I've warned him that he might fall into the same trap as dad, and never actually get it done, as has everybody else around him, but he's more practical and pragmatic, and also richer, so it might actually be liveable at some point. But that's not why I'm here. I'm here for three things. Life. Death. Nostalgia. And sausages. Ok, four things.
I can't remember just how much firewood I've chopped here. Probably several metric tonnes. And most of it is still around me. In that pile, and that pile, and that pile, and in those two piles over there, and the other three on the other side of the cottage. And that other one under the tree. So I think I've earned the right to burn some of it. My brother built a new brick firepit. I'm gonna use that. For two things. Number one, sausages. Yes, those godawful Swedish sausages I've missed so much. They might not be quality food, but they are nostalgia, and the only way to eat them properly is to get that proper black cancer crunchy coating from a real wood fire. Number two, destroy evidence. To burn all those papers with personal information. The doctors' notes, the medical records, the medical benefit details, the appeals, the court details. All that stuff that you don't want to get into the wrong hands. I only call it evidence for comedy value. It's much more boring than that, I just don't want it to fall into the hands of another scammer.
But that's the fire pit, the new brick barbeque. That's new. For as long as I can remember, the old bonfire place has always been about 7 meters down towards the river. It's still there, a ring of stones, a centre of old ashes. I honestly don't understand why the new brick fire pit was not built there, but at this moment, I am very pleased it was not. Nine years ago, this is where me and my wife spent our honeymoon, all two nights of it. We'd incinerate those sausages, melt marshmallows, drink the cheapest beer, and have a tiny sip of her favourite whisky, all by the midnight sun of the arctic, lighting up the massive river behind us. It was magic. She was so happy there. She always said she wanted to move to Sweden. However, that never happened, for several practical and financial reasons. And also because she died four years ago.
This is the first time since then I've been able to come back. Two years ago, when I was last in the country, I brought with me a small glass jar of some of her ashes, thinking I'd some day get to go here, and spread them where I knew she was happy. But that was as Covid was breaking out, and I had to cut my trip short, and go back early. But now I'm here, and now I can. So I scattered her ashes over the old ashes, probably breaking some law in doing so, and probably the first law I ever broke anywhere. I then put two tiny flags in the glass jar, one Scottish and one Swedish, and a folded up note with the lyrics to Eels: In My Dreams, and I threw the glass jar into the river. For me, this was the way of saying goodbye that I'd wanted to do for four years, but had not been able to do. Until now.
I went back to the brick fire pit. I ate the sausages. I drank the cheap beer, and her favourite whisky. This is when it hit me. This thread. This is when the idea came to me. Life. Death. Nostalgia. Inevitability. Over here, the new fire pit, that's where I was cooking my food. Life. Over there, the old bonfire ashes, and now her ashes. Death. This whole journey, and everything I'm sifting through. Nostalgia. Seeing my parents in the care home, knowing what's coming. Inevitability. I had a lot to ponder. And also, some badly charred sausages to eat.
Gray on 25/6/2022 at 01:47
Back at the house, I was exhausted from cycling uphill for an hour, and stinking of smoke. It's all fun and games while you're IN the smoke, keeping the mosquitos away, and munching on saturated fat and probably highly toxic badly burned death cancer foods, but now, it's just a stink. Earlier, as I was digging through one of my boxes, I found some old clothes I didn't bring to Scotland with me nine years ago. Sure, now that I had my suitcase happily back from its adventure in Amsterdam, I had two clean t-shirts, but it was more fun to wear something I hadn't seen for years. Now, should I go with the basic black, or the other black, or the grey, or the other grey? No, let's make it fun, and go with the black one with a logo for a long defunct indie record label, and pretend that I used to be cool at some point. The logo glows in the dark!
But first, a sauna. Inside, cleansing myself, I was thinking, this whole journey is a lame metaphor of cleansing myself from my past. I need to shed the dead weight of nostalgia. I have too much stuff I don't need, physically and emotionally, and there's too much here that I've not touched or longed for or even remembered for eleven years, surely, I can just get rid of it. I need less stuff, not more. I need to move on. That is the plan. But we're not there just yet. There's work to be done.
What shall I do with all my CDs? What about my old synths, can I be arsed to sell them? Surely, they're from the crappiest era of synths, the mid-to-late-80s-and-early-90s, not old enough to be cool, but too old to be useful. Can I afford to just give them away? I clearly don't need them. I may be poor, but I also can't be arsed to haggle over the tiny amounts they might be worth. Books, well, ironically I fully intend to burn my F451, the others will probably just be recycled for wood pulp, nobody here would want an English version of Mostly Harmless.
I probably have some form of mild OCD. I always think something might be useful, or necessary, in the future. So, when going through all my stuff, I have to somehow save it for later first. I'm mid-process of trying to FLAC all my CDs, I'm up to F. They're already MP3'd, but, well, you know. All my papers, I scan before I throw out. All my papers. All. That means going through roughly a metre and a half, the last half metre being the aforementioned medical stuff, the rest being harmless yet possibly interesting, for nostalgic purposes. Bleh. Nostalgia. There we are again. I WILL throw this old crap out, I just need to scan it first. Just in case. Old yearbooks. Ranging from high school, through college, through university. Oh look, there's someone I hadn't thought about in 30 years. I fancied her briefly for about two weeks but never spoke to her. That guy I beat at badminton. I also fancied her. And her. And that one. And those. That guy was a jerk. I fancied her. Those three, we worked together one summer when I was 16. Her, I fancied. Her, I actually spoke to, she did NOT fancy me. And so on. Endless pointless crap, but a lifetime of memories. My first kiss. My first girlfriend. My first breakup. All the things that shaped me to be the person I am today. Scanned, saved to disk. Now I can let it go and move on. It's an ending of sorts, but one of freedom rather than sadness. The less I have, the better I feel.
Up to a point, obviously, I still need my bloody laptop, I'm not the Buddha. Yet. And the charger, clearly.
So, for the second time in my life, I'm going through all that I have ever owned, done, written, recorded. I'm trying to shake off the curse of nostalgia, and get rid of as much as possible. But I'm fighting against my own nature as an OCD hoarder, that stuff might come in handy one day. I'm sure it will, as soon as I get rid of it, Murphy's Law tells me so. But experience doesn't. So, I'm taking it in baby steps. 178 data CDs? Well, I can put that data onto a USB thumb drive and throw away the CDs. There. Space saved. And I'll probably never look at that thumb drive, but I still have it. Just in case. That old mid-90s PC that won't boot up anymore? I could salvage the HD, it might have something on it, and I can discard the other hardware. Space saved. And so on. And the next time I go through this process, I can probably throw away all of those things too.
It's not that I think nostalgia is all bad. It can feel great to have old memories wash over you, remembering some of the best times of your life. But then to let go. What's done is done, it won't come back. Great memory. Let's keep it that way and not try to continue to live in it.
Tocky on 25/6/2022 at 02:42
And that's why I like you.
PigLick on 26/6/2022 at 11:37
Keep the synths, you never know.
Twist on 26/6/2022 at 22:18
Boring? Pointless? I hung on to every word and failed to fight back the... onions.
D'Arcy on 27/6/2022 at 22:19
Gray! Always so nice to see one of the really old timers. Loved every word of your posts :)
Gray on 1/7/2022 at 00:07
Standing in line in the supermarket, on a hot summer's day, it slowly begins to dawn upon me that it may have been somewhat unwise to wear a t-shirt that had been in a box for 11 years. I'm getting increasingly aware that my deodorant is not living up to its name, and that I now smell as if I've been in a box for 11 years. This will have to be amended.
Back at the house, I now have to figure out how the new washing machine works. My older brother had a new one installed. Apparently this one has BlueTooth. Seems very useful, if it can remotely hang up the laundry for me afterwards. Otherwise, I fail to see the point, but meh, I'm old and stupid, and five years from now I probably can't live without it. But as I open the compartment for the detergent, there's another clue of my mother's increasing inability. The whole damn thing is clogged with a massive lump of dried detergent. She must have repeatedly crammed too much in, not paying attention. This makes me doubt the cleanliness of everything in the cupboards, and later re-wash quite a lot of it. With good reason. But the new washing machine runs like a dream, I wish I could afford one as nice as this, the one I have back in Scotland leaks and sputters at random moments so you can never take your eyes off it, or you'll drown the downstairs neighbours. Yes, in Scotland, houses are built like it was the 1820s, even though mine was in 1997, and you can't get the bloody floor wet. And the washing machine is in the kitchen. How primitive. But I digress. That is a whole other rant.
And now, as I walk around the house, I notice more and more signs of my mother's dementia. Out by the garage, I found an oven grating with some sort of black plastic melted right deep into it. Cause unknown. And everywhere are post-it notes, increasingly angry, aimed at people who are not real but she thinks are. Only the two of them lived in the house, but she's writing angry notes to "the people upstairs". Now, the noise upstairs is from the rain on the corrugated aluminium roof. There's nobody upstairs. But when she was a girl, they lived in a flat with bothersome neighbours, who'd stomp on the floor smoke, and curse. So, her notes are about them smoking and cursing. Something that happened 65 years ago. At one point, she was convinced me and my younger brother had been kidnapped by these evil people upstairs, so she phoned the police. The police cleverly phoned social services. They phoned my older brother. He phoned me. I phoned my mother, to assure her I was not A) seven years old, and B) not kidnapped. As I was speaking to her, she knew who I was in the present day, grown-up me, but she was still trying to explain that seven-year-old me had been kidnapped. It took quite a long time to explain that I was fine.
Gray on 5/7/2022 at 21:32
Reading this back, I realise I dropped several story elements. I planted the seeds but never elaborated. You want dull boring pointless crap? I'll give you dull boring pointless crap!
The whole bit in the first post, about the insect infestation, it was all true and a very severe cause of anxiety, as it happened just as I was planning to leave. It really worried me, leaving town not knowing how that would play out. Going for the cheapest of jokes, you might say it put ants in my pants. But, thankfully, the Lethal Toxic Poison Spray of Fatal Death lived up to its name. They died. I had people check on the flat, and it was all fine. Phew. I planned to include continual updates on the horrible progress, but it was so undramatic it literally fell dead, much like the insects.
The concert my brother bought tickets for was The Pet Shop Boys. I was quite a big fan in the mid-80s to early 90s, but haven't kept up since. It was a very impressive show. It reminded me of what fantastic pop songs they wrote, and apparently still do. Somewhat predictably, it started with just the two of them on stage, but with every song, the scene grew and became more impressive, and a full band was revealed behind them. And the lights became animated, and the screens started to move. It became more, and more, and more. By the end of it, it so massively awesome, and they did every single song I ever wanted to hear. Except for Paninaro, but I can live with that. It was a little bit like this:
[video=youtube;sLGYgYDR3Ek]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLGYgYDR3Ek[/video]
But not there.
There are more loose threads to tie up, but that's for another day. There's a side plot at Schiphol airport with the 76-year old American Lewis from Boston I'm considering to include, but that's not interesting either. And a train elaboration, of many coincidences. And then the continuing story, as if anybody gives a rat's ass. But it'll be here. Best avoided.
But the lamest of metaphors, the journey, and the inner journey. At some point I'll get to what the whole bloody point of this thread was. If there ever was one.
