...I'm gonna be whipped with a frying pan. And as far as I know there's not really all that much you can do to prepare for that sort of thing. Pain is pain. Tvi...

Me and a friend from London went to Stockholm last week. (Beautiful, lovely Stockholm!)


I thought about contacting a few people I know there that I hadn't seen in a while, but I just didn't have time. The one I felt the most guilty about was Helena, since she's ALWAYS inviting me over, asking when I'm coming, whether I'm on my way yet or not! She's really lovely and has got a great sense of humour, so I thought to myself that if I do manage to find some extra time I'll get in touch, maybe I'll even stay an extra day!

But I didn't! (Hang on, I'll explain!)

And just a few hours after that I'd arrived in Malmö the day afterwards, she texted me wondering when I was coming over! Oh, the guilt! If that wasn't the work of Cosmo then I don't know what could possibly be!

Helena, I'm sorry...please don't fry me. Or whip me. Or anything else that hurts more than a few bee stings or so. If I ever move to Stockholm, I'll pop over and do your dishes for a week. Cos honestly, I've got some high quality excuses coming up here...

First of all, we only had a few days and had planned spending them in the archipelago. I've been dreaming about those 24.000 islands for so many years now and have wanted to see them for more summers than I can count. (I mean, I've been to Stockholm loads of times, but not to these fantastic fairy tale islands!) So the idea was to go there to camp and swim and do other summer stuff in order to fool the climate into believing that it was still summer for just one more week. So we did! And even though the climate wasn't as gullible as we thought, it was still absolutely mesmerizing (and at times even sunny!)

The only point where I had some time over was on Sunday, but both me and my friend were absolutely exhausted and got stuck on a bench in the central station eating sausages, playing sudoku…for pretty much the whole day! I can't remember the last time I was even close to feeling so totally and utterly wiped out.

Afterwards I calculated that my average amount of sleep during the last week had been less than 3,7 hours per night. Three of those nights being in a tent. A cold one. By the sea.
(But a beautiful sea it was! And me and my winterjacket even dedicated a spiritual moment to it by the beach listening to music in the middle of the night. It's so stunning it hurts...)

But even being as tired as I was, I still managed to quite efficiently kill a few flies. At New Years Eve I came up with a slightly different sort of resolution. I (and some others who went along with it) decided to do 52 weird things in the upcoming year, which would add up to 1 weird thing each week, roughly. It would be healthy, I reckoned, cos that way you would try new things. Things that you otherwise would never find out whether you liked or not. This was a serious opportunity. You could do things that would normally classify you as a complete and utter idiot, but now you suddenly had rules that liberated you from all personal responsibility! I mean, quite obviously I, as in me, would normally prefer to chew my own arm off rather than going to a cabbage exhibition, but suddenly I had 52 justified reasons that made it all make total sense!

And I'm genuinely grateful to my warped resolution, cos thanks to that I can now proudly claim that I know how to yodle! Properly! Goats stop and ponder when they hear me. Then they follow me! I also now know how to build an igloo! Properly! Have you seen "The day after tomorrow"? Well, when that happens, you know who to contact!

Another idea I'd had was to go trainspotting. But it's something you would have to do with someone else. Otherwise, resolution or no resolution - you're just an idiot. An idiot waiting for a train. There were actually several people who agreed to do it with me "at some point", but all the promises came with pretty hefty pricetags… I had to do stuff in return, like play bingo or go picking berries (in granmas garden…120 miles away!)

Now, sitting in Stockholm central station, I just realized that Mission Trainspotting suddenly could be accomplished incredibly easy, with me not even having to move. Much. The tables had turned…

While waiting for the hours to pass in order to get home to Malmö, I managed to get quite excited about the whole idea. I'm not really sure what a "real" trainspotter, a professional one, is actually doing, if there are any certain rules or if I should have bought any specific equipment. And I don't know what the standard procedure actually is. I mean, yes, I guess it's about spotting trains, but do they have to be moving? Is it only supposed to be thrilling to see them being on time or is it ok to feel the same level of sensation when they are late? I got really into it! The peak of excitement, I think, came when the Gothenburg train was 15 minutes late. People were frantic! We didn't even get an explanation. Why was it late? And why was it important for us to know why? (And why the hell was it important for me to know why? I wasn't even going anywhere near Gothenburg!!)

It was a little bit like watching a movie. You got the action, I think we can all agree on that. But it was also about drama and comedy and painful tragedi. One man, a tired man, who had forgotten his umbrella at home and had therefore got wet, wanted to buy a cup of coffee. He went up to the coffee machine with hope in his eyes, his mouth open with anticipation. He put his coins into it and pressed the appropriate buttons only to find out that the machine had run out of milk! I can't express the look of pain in that mans eyes! Oh the poor man, he didn't see that coming, he didn't, he really didn't!

Fair enough, it didn't look like the man was particularly poor. And he could quite easily have got into one of the coffeeshops inside the main building instead (although there were queues to be fair…) but if you would have been there... If you would have seen the movie - my Stockholm Central station Trainspotting movie (it'll probably come to a cinema near you very very soon), especially if you would have watched it in slow motion or in black and white, maybe without the sound on (or actually - the rain was quite effective…), then I'd like to think that you'd have got quite caught up in the moment.