Cool!

As you may or may not know, I have two jobs – both to do with writing. On Mondays, I take the little blue tram into Stockholm to sit in the office and work for a day. It’s nice to get out of the house and my usual routine of coffee, work and fetching the kids from kindergarten and school. It’s my day of treating myself to a lunch out, doing a bit of mindful shopping (usually at the health food shop and the book store) and pretending to be hip while sitting at my favourite café and drinking a really good coffee.

On the way back from lunch, coffee and a haircut (it’s amazing what you can pack into a lunch hour!), I was stopped in my tracks by .. er… well, ice. As you have probably gathered, Swedes are obsessed with the stuff: they build bars, and restaurants, and hotels out of it. Or they can be found enjoying the icy surfaces of lakes and inland seas at the weekends as they skate on it.

It turned out quite n-icely.

Oh – what is it? A big block of ice, lying on a bed of ice chips. Inside the ice block there are a lot of corks. It was an advertising stunt for the Wine Cellar. I wanted to join in and sample a few wines, but you had to be ‘in the trade’ in order to be allowed entrance. Apparently, just claiming to love wine wasn’t enough.

Sadly, but soberly, I went back to work.