Supercargo's blog/

My Grandmother

Gran and Gran

As Ipernity wouldn't let me forget, Monday 30th July was my 49th birthday. What Ipernity doesn't know is that it was also my grandmother's birthday. If she were still with us, she would have been 107. Gran (my mother's mother) died in February 1992, five month short of her 92nd birthday. I was looking through some boxes of old pictures this week, and found these two pictures of her. In the over-exposed one, she's was about 88 and I got her to pose with her portrait - the one I posted a photo of the other week.

Gran at 90

The other I took about 18 months before her death, among the last I took of her. By the time of this picture, she was drifting into senility. Fiercly independent, she carried on living alone in her own little home. A few months after this picture, though, she fell in her kitchen and wasn't able to get up again. My mother found her lying on the floor and was able to get her to a hospital. We don't know how long she was lying on the floor, but too long. She spent her remaining months in a nursing home.

Monday 30th July: I turn 49. 
The horror, the horror, followed by the stoic acceptance of the passage of time. I am still recovering from my cold which has mostly focused on my vocal chords. Mornings, I start out with a wheeze and a whisper. Three mugs of hot tea and honey later and I move on to phase two: the old man cough. This seems to start somewhere in my toes build its way up to a panic of unbreath in my chest, grip my whole body in a paroxism of shaking and pretty disgusting retching sounds and result in a really pitful quantity of phlegm to spit into a handkerchief. Phase three has me responding to questions in a graveled whiskey voice which gradually subsides into more normal tones as the morning goes on. A birthday feast prepared by my good wife receives due attention. I over-eat. Again. (Lot of that this summer.)

Oh yes, and Ingemar Bergman died and suddenly all the TV schedules are rearranged for an impromptu Bergman season. Do I really want to see The Seventh Seal again? Not really, no.

Tuesday 31st July

Paintbrush 2

In what seems like the first sunshine for months, we take the bus north to the island of Tjörn (pronounced something like sh-earn). On Tjörn, at Skärhamn (share hamn), we

Stickertickets

 visit Nordiska akvarellemuseet (we'll not even try to pronounce that - besides it has a name in English: the Nordic Watercolour Gallery) to see the visiting collection of British Watercolourists. The likes of Cotman, Turner, Blake, Palmer, Rowlandson and good deal more I'd never heard of. The logo of the museum is a paintbrush, a massive sculpture of which stands outside the gallery and which also appears on the sticker/entrance tickets which we wear during our visit. Leaving, we conform to the custom of adding our stickers to the statue.

In the evening, back in Gothenburg, we wait to meet Lena C. at Järntorget, where I try to capture sunlight through the falling water of the fountain.

 

Wednesday 1st August. 
I spend an exceptional length of time playing with/learning to use my drawing tablet. I'm getting quite proficient.

Thursday 2nd August. 
The post brings a copy of Arto Paasilinna's The Year of the Hare (recommended by Annjin). I start reading and can't stop - I'm about half way through by the end of the day. Very laconic humour. I want to see this book filmed by Aki Kaurismäki. The Internet Movie Database says it has already been filmed (though by Risto Jarva) in 1977 (as Jäniksen vuosi). I must try to see a copy.

Friday 3rd August.
My morning cough has shrunk to a shadow of its former self, thank goodness. Breakfast at Café Dream on Linnégatan while I'm waiting for my 10 o'clock meeting to show. Rice-pudding and jam, bacon and meatball butties, orange juice and coffee, peanut-butter and orange marmalade sandwiches. My philosophy is: when

Eye

out, eat what you'd never make for yourself at home. Pretty good for SEK 69. (Near the Linné Youth Hostel if you're interested.) Later, a haircut and a shower and then I try some self-portrait poses which result in the stoic/horror at the head of this.

 I also try photographing myself through the magnifying glass we bought at the Watercolour Museum to see the details in the pictures.

Saturday 4th August. 
A guided walk around Kungsladugård, a district of Gothenburg which saw a planned suburb develop between 1910 and 1940. Bit unsure what I wanted to photograph when we started out, but after a while I realised that most of the houses were distinguished from one another by their windows, so windows were my theme.

Window 3

Window 1

Window 2

Window 8

Sunday 5th August. 
A day of anguish - sorting out books to give away. Eventually most of our detectives stories and some of my science fiction selected. We've been talking about making room for four years - ever since moving from 90 square metres to our present 80 square metres. There was even a rule which said that every new book bought in meant an old book had to go. Pain! I can still remember books I had to sell when I was a student, and others which I lent in good faith to evil book hoarding types who never returned them. But, I have to admit, rinsing the shelves of things one has read once and not looked at again makes sense ... now there's room for new books.

Monday 6th August.
And so here we are, one week nearer to the end of the holidays. well, the sun's shining and there's a dry martini cocktail (shaken, not stirred) waiting to be drunk on the balcony in the sun.

Cocktail

Our school year started a couple of weeks ago. The kids started back last week. The people who are respnsible for keeping them off the streets and (in the best of all possible worlds) inculcating the values and mores of civilised behaviour - oh yeah, and teaching them things - us teachers, that is - we started back a week before that. Two weeks of my life I shall never see again just passed by in a flash.

I'm sorry, this is getting terribly maudlin. (He takes another sip and pauses to contemplate the text.)

I'm having some difficulties seeing what I'm writing. No, I'm not drinking too much. It's my glasses. Last spring I finally bowed to the inevitable and agreed to my optician's enthusiastic promotion of 'progressive' lenses. Once upon a time there were bifocals, then there were trifocals and now we have progressive focus lense. (No one I've talked to in England seems to know the term 'progressive lenses' so they may be called graduated or varifocal lenses there. (Thank you, Wikipedia.))

All well and good. When I got them, I spent a happy 48 hours watching the world curve around me. At one point I was sitting at a big conference table swinging my head gently from side to side, enjoying the sensation of being on a ship in a high sea, the table swinging up and down as I turned my head this way and that. Then I realised that the rest of the people around the table were eyeing me curiously.

Well, the novelty wore off, and I had no trouble seeing out of the lenses. That wasn't the problem. The problem was the bloody things kept slipping off my nose. I went back and back to the optician. At one point the assistant who was fitting them remarked that I had a very odd shaped head, Oh right, so there's nothing wrong with the frames, it's my head that's the problem. Well, that's good to know.

 Eventually they reached a compromise, the frames and my head, and the frames stayed on fine for all of July and August, but as soon as I got back to work, they started playing up again. So now I'm alternating between my old pair (stay on my nose, but I can't read anything close up) and my reading glasses (fine for reading and OK for the computer, but I can't see across the room with them). I haven't taken the progressives back to the optician's again yet. I'm trying to think of something really withering to say when I get told again how my head is the wrong shape. I do withering quite well in English but Swedish is more difficult.

And now I seem to  wittering as well. OK, I'll wind up by pointing out that I've just uploaded my third essay in the fine art of video filming. The sound track is nicked from the album as the quality of the recording I made 'live' was dire, but I've let some of it fade in and out in what I fondly imagine to be a nod to the laws of copyright. The band is Fleshquartet, the singer is Freddie Wadling and both band and singer have their own Myspace sites which you can visit by clicking on the obvious places.

Blast. I just realised I spelt Freddie's name wrong on closing credits. (We've established I can't see what I'm doing, I think) Sorry Freddie!

 

(I'm not sure what that smiley is doing, but it's supposed to show embarrasment.)