Category Archives: Jon

Summer Holidays: The One Where They Leave

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Chip, Sam and Indigo went back to England this evening. We spent the day in town, Sam wanting to meet a friend and see a few sites (i.e shops).

It’s always a strange situation when close friends are packed and ready to go home. It’s not an unpleasant one, just a situation devoid of the joy of having them near, coupled with an underlying muteness.

We are so happy and privileged that they took the time to be with us. It was particularly excellent that we got to see Chip’s new girlfriend, Sam, and her daughter, Indigo: she is a brilliant person who really suits Chip; Indigo must have thought it was heaven being away from central London, being able to run around bare-foot and swim whenever she wanted to; Chip has a girlfriend!

We really hope that the next visit is in the near future, but we know that the reality means, at the very least, a year.

The End Of A Promising Football Career

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Before the swearing begins

On the way back from Jämtland, we stopped at our usual roadside restaurant in Tönnebro, so that Freya and Indigo could let off some steam. The journey takes about six hours, and this particular stop is pretty much halfway home, boasting a very pleasant lake and beach.

Freya managed to fall over in the lake, which meant a quick dash into the water to avoid any unnecessary drownings. Unfortunately, I failed to see a large stone lying between Freya and me, and gave it (and my toe) a jolly good kicking.

I didn’t really notice the pain until I’d picked up Freya and carried her to shore, Then I did. Then, after a few minutes, it mellowed a bit. Then it hurt lots.

Result? A broken toe.

Summer Holidays: The One With The Conundrum

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Click on the image or be ever confounded by what I’m ranting about.

I’ve been doodling around in the garden quite a bit lately, trying to rake away about a thousand years of fircones that fall endlessly from this monster of a tree that takes up far too much space for my liking. It’s been taking so much space in the real world that its presence has even seaped into my own personal space.

I’ve been trying to do some amateur quantity surveying, attempting to work out just how much firewood we would have if we could ever get the thing cut down without destroying our house or killing the neighbour’s dogs. Although since they seem to spend all their time locked up in cages, barking ceaselessly at everything that moves and most things that do not, I’m not sure they would actually object.

Anyway, this tree is fucking huge, and continues to cause me constant raking expeditions.

It was on such expedition that I noticed something: lodged firmly in the craggy bark is a rather small fircone. How this fircone got there is either a complete mystery or a freak of nature. The only possible explanations I can think of are:

1. The fircone fell with such a force (perhaps accompanied by a vicious downwind) that it simply burrowed itself into the bark, like an arrow.

2. A really angry three-foot squirrel had decided that there was more to life than eating fircones and running away from everything, and at the very moment of passing our tree had chosen to vent its animosity at said fircone (realising that his “running away from things” gene would never allow him to go a kick a small child in the shins).

3. The fircone had dropped on the ground many years ago, right next to the trunk. As the years passed it got slowly scooped up by the growing tree, and engulfed into its boosom.

The second option appeals to my sense of reality; however, I believe it’s probably something nearer the third. Whatever the reason, this truly shows that nature can deal the occasional joker. Compared to this, crop-circles are wank.

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Summer Holidays: The One With Peppe

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You know, writing a blog ( known in today’s vernacular as ‘blogging’) is no easy task. Although it may appear to the untrained eye that I write the first thing that comes into my head without even glancing for bad punctuation, grammar use or syntactic errors, I actually don’t.

But even disregarding the technical aspect of ‘blogging’ (blogging! What will they think of next?), there is more to making it look like a random assortment of the twenty-five letters of the alphabet (I never use ‘z’ out of principal, except back there, but that was for explanatory purposes, and except for the word ‘pizzle‘, which simply demands to be used, to the point of becoming hackneyed).

Sometimes the most difficult part of writing is not the words, or word structure, or knowing what to write: it’s flow.

I can spend an eternity writing the opening sentence, deleting it, rewriting it, realising I’m going to hit a dead-end, sit thinking about it with pen in hand, get frustrated, then forget the whole idea and go and get really drunk. This was nearly one of those situations, and only exists because of this rather long aside.

Hobnobbing with the elite

Anyway, the original point of this entry was going to be that last Saturday I met Peppe Eng ( a well-known Swedish sports journalist/commentator who has become even more well-known due to a recent appearence on some celebrity ‘learn different dance styles every week and embarrass yourself on national TV by showing that you dance like a pelican with a stick up its arse’ dance show/competition), and that Inger performed two short dance routines with him; however, in getting this entry together I ended up, after every failed attempt and deletion, going to play my latest PS2 acquisition, a psychedelic Beatmania game, Frequency.

Three or four days of tapping shoulder buttons in progressively anarchic and near impossible combinations has led to me seeing the game when I close my eyelids. A sure sign, then, that this game rocks.

I was particularly chuffed with this purchase because it’s an old game, sought after by the cognoscenti, and I got it brand-spankling new for a tenner at some Toys R Us style shop.

Although ten pounds of good quality LSD would get you extremely fucked for a very long time, this is a good second choice, with the added benefit that your friends get also get arsed for the same money. Like Rez, this game is a work of art.

Oh, did I mention that I met Peppe Eng?

Summer Holidays: Thoughts From The Garden

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Finally, after literally years of waiting, it’s the summer holidays again. As usual we’re spending it at our house in the north, where the weather has thus far been an uncomfortable 29 degrees, which means that two sweaty days working in the garden has made me a beacon for the midges, mosquitos and horse-flies (aka gadflies) to take their sumptuous morsels of Jon.

And so, with much greenery of different varities and obscure Latin names drowning my field of vision, I’ve been thinking a bit about grass.

I have always thought that grass is a weed. I have yet to check this out, as I do not have a computer nearby (this entry has been written using the traditional method of pen and paper, to be transfered at a later date), so in order not to have wasted this hitherto titilating insight into my life I shall just presume it to be so.

Anyway, in Swedish the word grass is”gräs”; the word for weed is “ogräs”, using the prefix “o”, which basically means “un”; thus ogräs means ungrass.

What struck me about this Orwellian building of words was that if you take gräs, and plant it purposefully in a well-kept border of exotic plants and flowers, does it become ogräs? Or is it still gräs? Or is it both gräs and ogräs?

I wonder, then, if there are tempestuous debates in the forums of Swedish horticultural sites, where ogräs supporters vehemently brandish the followers of Gräs as simple-minded, asinine sheep-shaggers, whilst the gräs clan mock their nemeses as self-involved, ostentatious fools.

I wonder, also, if I should be spending less time in the sun.

N.B. According to Wikipedia, a weed is an unwanted plant, which means that my theory about grass is wrong; however, on the same page, Cannabis is stated as a possible weed, so I’m not sure I should believe anything from this particular wiki entry.