How to learn Swedish in 1000 difficult lessons

As we sat in the dining room - me and the husband, A., the TV producer and C., the fashion photographer and a few others - guzzling wine and laughing and eating filet mignon, potato gratin and salad prepared by L., the chef, (the ultimate luxury is having someone come and fix a glorious meal for you), someone started telling the story of her recent amorous escapade with an electrician who came to work on her apartment and how put out she was when he just up and left as soon as his, uh, work was done.

The husband left the room and came back shortly, brandishing two pairs of handcuffs. "You should've used these to handcuff him to the bed, then he couldn't have left," he said. He had gotten them long ago for a photo shoot, he explained. "They're actually real!"

The dinner quickly degenerated into an orgy of handcuff jokes and storytelling and the men in the party rolling around on the dining room floor, trying desperately to slide their handcuffed hands from behind their backs, over their asses and their feet so that the cuffs were in front instead of in back.

Sadly, I couldn't even get my hands past my ass. In fact, my skinny husband was the only one who succeeded.

"Remember the one about when our friend the policeman as a joke handcuffed his wife the priest one morning before work and then couldn't find the key, and she nearly had to go to a meeting with her boss or the bishop or someone, with handcuffs on?" the husband said.

Oh, yeah, I remember that. That's my favorite handcuff story.

The Swedish word for the day is handklovar. It means, of course, handcuffs.

- by Francis S.