Going to do the second homelessness post in future - whenever I’ve understand all the things on the (long and growing) list of books I’ve got. In the meantime - some thoughts on winter, and some winter delights.
Qualia, in philosophy, is the ‘ness-ness’ of something. The redness of red is what you miss out on if you’ve only ever read about the colour, if you know all the facts without having seen it. The you-ness of you is (maybe) what’s lost if you’re replaced with a biologically, atom-for-atom, identical zombie.
Swedish seasons have absolutely mainlined qualia. Being so close to the equator, each season is clearly marked, and impossible to ignore - the seasonness of the season is in your face and shouting. Summer was SUMMER - long days at the lakes, yellow taffeta light, hikes. Autumn was Autumn-ness XL, level 901283 - synesthesiac, trees flavoured apple and pumpkin. With each dramatic shift, it’s impossible to ignore the effects that the seasons have on your body and your brain.
And now to winter.
Swedish winter is proper winter. There’s snow heavy enough to tear metal signs pitched at slightly the wrong angle, deep enough to drown a Lime scooter, only visible from an ominous red light blinking through the snow. The lake has frozen, and I can hear high squeaks of stranded mallards, forced into flying, wings unused to carrying their paunchy stomachs. As the lake thawed, it’s become dotted with icy lily pads, and at points you see reeds, normally hidden under flowing water, made still and visible, suspended in the sheets of ice.
I can feel myself slowing down, sleeping longer, the rhythm of my days lengthening. After escaping to sunnier spots for the last couple of years, I feel like I’ve built up a winter deficit, and now I’m being hit full-force. But this is a good place to learn to winter. The Swedes take winter for what it is - a time for books, coffee shops, dinners, curling. There’s a recognition that different seasons are good for different things, and each has its own virtues, each has to be adapted to. When the snow came, someone covered the flower boxes with pine leaves.
Light, winters purpley-blue light becomes a factor in the day - attended to, blocking out a couple of hours to walk and see the sun before it disappears at three. Chinese painters in the T’ang dynasty recognise five different kinds of black - burned, thick, heavy, pale and clear - and you can see this here, in the strange monochrome light, the difference between the scratchy silhouetted trees, the softer crevices in bark, the difference in the darkness at midnight and just after the sun has set.
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Some winter delights:
Stickers: These arrived in the post from my parents this week. I’ve been hiding them behind my back, and then accosting a flatmate and demanding they tell me what has made them proud recently. When they answer, I present them with a shiny smiley face. This activity has brought me more pleasure than any other £1.50 ever.
Cycling: My bike has a yellow bell with a smiley face on it - so if I ring it I literally ‘brrrring’ happiness. And that brings happiness. Which is pleasing. I love doing any basic action on a bike. I’m changing music - but on a bike! I’m checking directions - on a bike! Look at me! Look at how I navigate this speedbump, standing up-down so it doesn’t hurt! I am Victoria Pendelton!
Similarly: Scooters: Two male teenagers sharing an electric scooter, stood one behind the other on a Lime. It’s so endearing, one clinging onto the shoulders behind, two grown men transformed into Titanic’s Jack and Rose. Impossibly sweet.
Thinking: Enormous delight this week. My work-project has taken longer than planned and as a result I’ve been on sprint-pace for longer than anticipated. I’d got sluggish and slow, noticed prickly thoughts coming in at the edges and wanted to do something about it. Fortunately, I have a brilliant friend who has taken some of this on for me, and in freeing up my time it is like he’s sawed off a particularly nasty bit of gristle from my brain - and I can think again. Which is lovely. Huzzah for that.
Spotify Wrapped: Spotify Wrapped is one of the best indicators you have about how you felt in a year. We struggle to get a good idea of our mental states over long periods - the sample size is so small and so biased. But my Spotify Wrapped clocked in at 74,901 minutes (a full 15% of my year) and I can look at the music I’ve been listening to and make a guess about how I was feeling. It’s a nice picture.
Children’s Books: An excessive amount of freed up brain-space is going on children’s books. I rediscovered the 39 Clues recently, which, coupled with a Percy Jackson spell earlier this year, makes Rick Riordan the top of my Kindle Wrapped. There’s something so gobbleable about these punchy kids books, plot after plot after plot, delicious light effort reading.
Similarly: Children’s TV: My job is working on the sale of a kids program. This has brought me some nice absurdities - I’ve written Very Serious and Adult Research on the Wiffle-Bum; evaluated the significance of Boo-Snoo, and thought about the ever-green value of fart jokes.*
Cafe: I found a cafe with massive Edward Scissorhand sugar tongs - 12 centimetres long - and who knew sugar tongs even exist any more? Where do you get them? Why did they need to be four times the length of a sugar cube? Ridiculous but lovely. There’s the wonderful Swedish custom of ‘por tor’, which means ‘a little dribble’. It refers to the second cup of filter coffee you get, free, after your first - just ‘a little dribble’ more.
Words: Fneff: For feeling a bit meh. ‘No dilly no dally’: glorious phrase. Tonga - Swedish for thong. Crikey. Boshed. Cronked. Butt-hurt dweeb. Flim-flam. Tomfoolery. ‘A perplexity’ used by an Italian. Shilly-shallying. ‘Fiss-fiss’ - the Turkish for a spray pump.
This House:
It’s so cute!
This Poem:
There was a young man
From Cork who got limericks
And haikus confused
An Unexpected Avocado: I found an unexpected avocado in my bag. I’d crammed it in a separate pocket and forgotten it. What could be nicer?
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Recommendations:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1mF01MDQVD7a8fhR3ZCT3janUT_7WWHbu - Rachel Elizabeth Fraser - a top tier professor at Ox - has a bunch of her resources just… available online. Which is cool. If you’re looking to teach yourself something, this is a pretty neat place to start.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xg3hXCYQPJkwHyik2/the-best-textbooks-on-every-subject - similarly - a collection of the best textbooks on every subject. Reading a textbook always feels a bit lame. But, as this points out, the whole point of them is to teach you about a subject and give you a grounding.
*Separately - if you have kids, don’t let them anywhere near Cocomelon. That stuff is crack. I’ve had to watch a few of the videos, and I can hear a shredding sound as my attention span is turned to dust. There’s a terrifying New Yorker article here. If there’s a philanthropist in search of a cause, stopping the Cocomelon brain-rot content is a good start.
If you enjoyed, take a look at … On Autumn Delights; On Delights or On Meandering
scruffled scruffy + rumpled
scallywag