A day

The sun actually made an appearance yesterday. There is no heat to it yet (it was -6°C) but you can see the sun getting higher and higher in the sky as the days pass.

I realised, after spotting these in a shop window, that I had never seen snowshoes in real life. They used to feature prominently in my childhood books, but I did not know people used them anymore. I guess it’s obvious I come from a hot and largely snowless country…

I saw these ‘cutoff waistband’ jeans in a trendy store today. Last popularised by Mariah Carey in 1999

I am not romantic and this type of thing is not normally my style, but I thought the dog-shape was really cute!

These two pictures at a local charity shop really cheered me up, particularly the ‘before and after’ placement.

I loved this bag. I grew up with Volkwagen (various buses owned by my bonus mom and one by myself, a Beetle owned by my sister, and a Golf owned by moi)

I am a non-practising, divorced Catholic. I belong to a congregation in Stockholm and pay 1% of my income to the Catholic Church; when I came to Sweden I was somehow registered as a Roman Catholic at both the church and the tax authority. Perhaps because I married in Dublin (another EU country) when the church had more power in Ireland than it does today. Interestingly, in 2024, only one person was training to be a priest in Dublin, a city with 1 million Catholics and nearly 200 parishes.

I do not attend mass but I do regularly light candles for members of my family who were and are devout. On the 20th I lit candles for my mother (who died 20 February when I was 19), my father (who died four months before her), and my brother (who died 16 February last year). The church was pretty full when I went. I always find it comforting to know that people have carrying them through these tough times and perhaps giving them a measure of peace.