The winter sun sets early in the North. Flying in to Stockholm across the frozen tundra of my home land, maybe 15.30 pm last week.
I visited Eva, my dear friend, the Swedish Ambassador to Mali, who was there as her last posting when I spent my last years there.
Here she is at 'Svenskt Tenn' a chic Swedish shop featuring all things expensive and highly desirable, a point of pilgrimage on a Saturday afternoon for the well-to .do Stockholm denizens and something of an institution. Eva always thinks it is her duty to 'Swedify' me again, since she thinks I am slipping away from my roots. When I was staying with her at the embassy residence in Bamako she used to show me appropriate Swedish films, such as a biopic of our assassinated prime minister Olof Palme. She also made me Biff A la Lindstrom' and other dishes which were intended to help in the Swedification process.
Although here below of course it is those splendid Italian Fornisetti plates that are the star of this dining table at Svenst Tenn:
I also met my brother Anders, whom I see very rarely. His wife Hanna is a Mezzo Soprano and sang the role of Carmen with her little group of very talented amateur opera singers. The Habanera is always a crowd pleaser of course.
The performance was held in a lovely late nineteenth century 'palace' just outside Stockholm, a pleasure villa built by a wealthy tobacco baron: the Ljunglofska Slottet.
Jeremiah and David will be here again this Christmas, there will be other friends too, as we celebrate Swedish Jul on Christmas Eve and proper English Christmas on the 25th, with the only Turkey in town I believe, ordered soon through the local butcher who always thinks that is fun. I try and get him to find a smallish Turkey, but that is wishful thinking. He always supplies one which has to be squeezed into the oven with force...
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