Bookwitch bites #83

I’m having problems. Just little ones, though. Except, I wasn’t just a little jealous when Sarah McIntyre went and blogged about going painting with Rolf Harris on television. That’s more like extremely jealous. The mitigating factors are two. I can’t draw or paint (counts as one, those do), and Sarah is so lovely it’s very hard to think badly of her.

Did I moan about the weather earlier this week? I can moan again, but the other way round. It is far too cold! But then everyone knows how cold it is in those far flung Nordic countries. It must be global warming (said Daughter) that’s behind it getting colder. I have packed swimsuit as usual. Doubt I’ll be using it. On the other hand, the Resident IT Consultant cycled off the first evening and flung himself in the sea. Not for long, but enough.

So, as Daughter speculated on Gulf streams and stuff, she suggested I could put the heating up a little. I said I could have, if I hadn’t turned it off as we arrived. I mean, you do, when it’s late May. Don’t you?

We went the long way round. No, the slower way round. Instead of getting on the through train from Copenhagen airport, we went through Copenhagen, in the opposite direction and north to Elsinore. Hamlet wasn’t at home. The sensible Danes wore coats and things, so they clearly knew it was chilly. Then we de-trained and went for the ferry, except that was more complicated than it should have been, and it was neither the Aurora nor the Tycho Brahe, both of which would have met with Daughter’s approval. It’s best if we don’t mention too much about the dubious vessel we did go on. It had (whispers) a smokers’ corner… Letting smoke out. (And, air to the smokers in. Do they really need to breathe?)

Once on the other side – Sweden, not the land of the dead – we waited for the train to take us further north, meaning we ended up on the one an hour later than if we’d picked the sensible alternative. At least the Resident IT Consultant could be talked out of the family experiencing the Copenhagen Metro, where no experiencing was necessary. The train covered the same distance admirably.

Because the ticket machine in Helsingborg panicked at the sight of my foreign credit card, we (legally) saved £10 on fares. We travelled on, and eventually swapped a pound of Stilton for a Saab. The natives really do have a liking for cheese. We stopped to stare at the red warning light for a while, before deciding to ignore it, shopped for milk and cheese and stuff (we had given our cheese away, remember), before finally picking up pizzas and driving off to see if there still was a house in which to eat them.

There was. Plenty of grass, too. But you saw that last year.

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