How to learn Swedish in 1000 difficult lessons

They poured themselves through the door at 6:30, bearing gin and vermouth and game. "He was such a bore," M. the cameraman said. "But he's dead now." It was A. the TV producer and her boyfriend, come early to prepare the main course: wild boar.

Ha ha, I said.

The guests - best friends of M., mostly TV people and a guy with a sock company - were due at 8:00, so there wasn't a minute to spare. And of course I'd done my bit much earlier - American apple pie (as opposed to Swedish apple pie, which just goes to show you that apple pie isn't particularly American at all, really. It was probably the French who invented it) and homemade cinnamon ice cream. So we had to sear big chunks of boar, and chop carrots and onions and parsnips, and pour cans and cans of tomatoes, and add red wine and sage and rosemary and cep mushrooms. The kitchen was, briefly, a hurricane, and all that boar-searing generated a lot of smoke so we had to open wide the window in the kitchen and open the balcony door in the living room. But it all turned out in the end.

Everyone arrived more or less eight-ish, and they were duly impressed by the apartment, and they drank martinis and yakked it up, and then sat obediently to dinner (all except the baby, who slept in his baby carriage in the spare bedroom). They ate the boar and the pie, and a few of them showed off their tattoos (strange collections of tiny drawings - half-hearts, pirates and parrots, a tiny bottle). Then the guy who is supposedly the best video editor in all of Stockholm and who has a thing for calves (not the animal, the body part) examined all of our legs. Apparently, for a calf-fetishist, long and muscular is the thing. Mine are pleasingly long, but he claimed he'd never seen such an unmuscular calf. For which I felt duly insulted. Unmuscular indeed. I should have stuck my heel up and pressed on my toe. But then, he really only likes women's calves anyway.

They left at 2 a.m. or so, leaving us with dirty dishes and probably a good 5 pounds worth of wild boar stew.

Good thing it tastes better warmed over.

The Swedish word for the day is vildsvin, which of course means wild boar.