We met up with the priest and the policeman and their baby to see an exhibit of photographs and have coffee.

They spent two days in the hospital last week. The whole family. They thought something was wrong with Signe, the baby, but it turned out she just had an innocuous virus. The truth was, the priest and the policeman were exhausted, the policeman had the stomach flu and it was just too much for all of them. Well, maybe not Signe, she was fine. But the rest of the family was seriously sleep-deprived.

"How come no one talks about this before you have a baby?" the priest wanted to know.

I think they should have special clinics where parents can go and sleep and relax while someone takes care of the baby for a few days.

The Swedish verb for the day is att fika. It means to have a coffee.

- by Francis S.

The American editor and his wife arrived from the States yesterday in the midst of the Swedish Christmas hullabaloo that is Lucia, Sweden's own festival of lights. I'd started the day on the subway, hungover after a night of Czech food (sausages, sausages, sausages, schnitzel, more sausages) and bohemian beer with colleagues, rudely awakened to the harsh reality that is life as I sat waiting for my train in the subway and I could hear caterwauling somewhere behind me, which once I'd boarded the train, turned out to be Lucia hooligans - grown men and women got up in white gowns and Santa Claus suits and candles on their heads or those pointy duncecaps. They were all hopped up on early morning glögg and singing loudly yet somehow tentatively, "Gläns över sjö och strand."

Once at the office, the celebration continued and for once, I was happy to be served wine for breakfast. It turns out that there is nothing like a little morning hair of the dog that bit you to ease the pangs of too much Bohemian beer the night before.

Later in the day, I ran off to go meet the American editor and his wife, who hadn't been back to Sweden in nearly a year and half. They had been picked up at the airport by R. and J. who had also come to Stockholm, so I also got to meet Hannes for the first time, his face round like his father's, his nose like his mother's, but in general very much his own little pink squirming self (although he rested quietly in my arms for, oh, at least three minutes - he didn't even really complain when his mother and I put him into his little snow suit).

Then it was running back to the office, then off for more glögg at a party in Kungsholmen, then back home again to pick up the American editor and his wife and go down to the apartment of L., the chef, and a party with more glögg.

I am glögged out. But oh, it's wonderful to have the American editor and his wife back. It's going to be like a great big sleepover from now until the 12th day of Christmas, as our apartment fills up with friends and family.

The Swedish phrase for the day is hos oss. It means, more or less, at our place, hos being an equivalent to the French word chez, more or less.

- by Francis S.

I haven't had my hearing checked in years, but I suspect I am, like my father, slowly going deaf. Although he's quite a bit further along the way than I am. It is, I have little doubt, a genetic thing.

What's strange is that it's not like I don't hear things, it's more that the background noise moves forward and I can't pull out the foreground noise from it. It feels not like I'm going deaf, but rather that I just can't quite pay attention hard enough. It drives the husband mad. He thinks that I don't listen.

My question is whether this is deafness, or late onset Atttention Deficit Disorder?

The Swedish phrase for the day is Vad sade du? It means, more or less, Excuse me, what's that you said? Except the Swedes leave out the excuse me part.

- by Francis S.

Saffron means Christmas in Sweden. It's found in pastries and snaps and any number of other savory or sweet things this time of year, imparting a strong yellow color and singular spicy taste.

At the grocery store, one has to ask the cashier for saffron, which is kept in little paper packets and held in the cash register with the money, being worth more than its weight in gold on account of it being picked by hand from crocuses, each of which has only three strands, small but powerful.

We bought some at the Christmas market in Gamla Stan yesterday. It was only a dollar or so per gram, an incredible bargain. Saffron is in fact poisonous, and if we'd wanted to spend twenty dollars, we could have purchased a lethal dose.

I think dying by saffron could be a strange and spectacular death.

The Swedish word for the day is läcker. It means tasty.

- by Francis S.

Last night, A., the assistant director, regaled us with tales of her former life as a model in Paris.

"Once, I worked on this job where they filmed us on a roller coaster in Barcelona," she said. "The camera, which probably weighed about 300 kilos, was bolted onto the first seat, and the other model and I were in the second seat with a bunch of extras behind us. After the first couple of times we went around, they told me that I actually didn't need to scream so much and that no one wanted to see my tonsils.

"The other model was getting married in two weeks and he'd never had sex with his fiancée before. 'Please God, don't let me die,' he kept saying and he so regretted that he hadn't had sex with her before. 'Why?' he kept saying and well, I was wondering why I'd taken the job, too. I mean, think about it, the camera was just held in place by a few bolts!

"At least they let us stop when we started to feel sick. They didn't care about the extras though, and they were throwing up. I think we went around 67 times or something."

A. survived it all, and was now having dinner with us.

A. and C., her fiancé the photographer, went home at about 2:30, leaving the cats with us (the cats had spent the day at C.'s studio). So, the husband and I crawled into bed at about 3 a.m. and tried to sleep with all kinds of strange and noisy cat games going around us in the dark, games that involved the sound of claws skittering wildly along the wooden floors and unknown objects crashing to the ground.

The Swedish phrase for the day is berg- och dalbana. It means rollercoaster.

- by Francis S.

As a boy, I was always small for my age, smaller than my brother who was a year and a half younger for as long as I can remember. And I grew slowly - my voice changed when I was 15. Until I was 30 or so, I always looked younger than I was.

Then the grey hair started to appear.

Then, even worse, it started to disappear, or at least recede a bit.

Now, I would say I look at least as old as my 41 years. Definitely middle aged. My brothers and sister seem to look quite a bit like they have looked since their early twenties, definitely older and perhaps not as skinny, but more or less like they always looked. Me, well, I look much less like I did 10 years ago.

They disagree with me, of course. "You don't look more different than we do!" they insisted over Thanksgiving, and I even think they believed it. But it simply isn't true.

I am mostly resigned to looking middle aged, but it's hard to ignore the cultural equation that youth equals beauty, or more important, its corollary that the older one is, the more unattractive one is. I sort of deny it, and sort of get annoyed with myself for being bothered by it. And, I sort of don't care although, to be honest, that's actually a very small and insignificant part of me. Mostly, I do really care.

The Swedish word for the day is vårdhem. It means nursing home.

- by Francis S.

My niece, the beautiful Princess I., is seven years old. She is in the first grade and learning how to read and write. She's great at phonetic spelling: "ornjs for sal" she wrote on a little piece of paper and put it next to the bowl of clementines sitting in my mother's kitchen.

Her mother (my sainted sister) told me that the other day the Princess I. brought her a piece of a paper and handed it to her with a wicked smile.

"These are your points," she told my sister. The paper had three columns. The heading for the columns were "Princess I." "Daddy" and "Mommy." Under each column was a number - 1,000 under the Princess I., 100 under Daddy and one measly point under Mommy.

Raising children is a thankless job.

The Swedish word for the day is systersdotter. It means niece.

- by Francis S.

Arriving back home in Stockholm from Chicago, all bleary-eyed and faintly nauseous despite having upgraded to business class, amazingly it is the darkness that is so comforting. I suppose it is because it was deep midwinter when I first arrived here to live.

The thing about the weather in Stockholm is that if the summer is glorious with lots of sun and heat, the winter can be magical, with the sideways sun glancing over the city covered in snow, and inside the smell of saffron and cinnamon and wax from a candle extinguished, a dream of Christmas.

On the other hand, if the summer is cold and dark and wet, no amount of charm can make up for months of muffled darkness. It took awhile, but I have an inkling how weather can drive one to suicide.

Now, to slough off the jet-lag before I start work again tomorrow.

The Swedish word for the day is kanel. It means cinnamon.

- by Francis S.

What Francis almost couldn't bear was Edu's flat aspect. The weariness in the eyes and voice, the depletion of effort to be his usual emotional, almost theatrical self. Of course he understood, and he also felt he understood, at least in part, Edu's insistence that he wanted to tell only a few of his closest friends, he didn't want people to know because he didn't want to be treated with kid gloves, he didn't want to become The Victim.

Francis wasn't sure how he himself would act in the same situation, perhaps he would revel in the attention, acting as people expected him to act, be brave and charming and self-effacing about it and accept what pity he could, take the leaway granted him. He suspected that would be the route he took if he himself were sick.

But Edu had balked at the sudden kindness of the nurse, of the secretary who let him use the phone to call the main hospital to make an appointment to have more bloodwork done. It was funny, in a way, to hear Edu complaining about such kindness when his complaint about Barcelona was that people were pigheaded, stupidly stubborn and mostly, they were blindly unkind, unkind as if being kind cost them money, and oh, how Catalans loved money, Edu said.

(from a Barcelona journal, 1998)

It is World AIDS Remembrance day. Think, and link.

The Swedish word for the day is ibland. It means sometimes.

- by Francis S.

Last night we had dinner in Östermalm at a little trattoria. Perhaps it was a bit elegant - eight tables with white tablecloths, simple candles and menus with fancy script - to be called a mere trattoria, I suppose it was more of a real restaurant, where we celebrated the birthday dinner for P., the father of the friend from London and the closest thing I have to a father-in-law.

We sat, eating perfect vegetables - my mother claims that a restaurant should be judged by its vegetables - and talking all at once, the husband and I, P. and his wife E., and the friend from London who was here to do a photo shoot for H&M.

"Ingrid is 76 and she lives all by herself," P. told me, speaking about one of his neighbors on the island where the family summer house is, formerly the farmhouse of his grandparents. "She has no indoor plumbing - she still uses an outhouse, and she gets her water from a stream. She hasn't been to the city in five years."

I am astonished, as P. has hoped I would be, that there is still at least one Swede in the year 2002 who lives without running water.

Tomorrow, we leave at 10:30 a.m. on a plane that will take us to Chicago, where we will arrive at noon, nine hours after we left. We'll be back in a week.

Happy Thanksgiving.

- by Francis S.

The Swedish word for the day is Hannes. It is a boy’s name, rather uncommon, and happens to be the name of the son of R. and J.

Hannes will be 12 hours old today at 3 p.m. central European time. Go ahead, read more about Hannes and his parents and leave your own birthday greetings.

- by Francis S.

Have I mentioned that the husband and I are time optimists?

Have I also mentioned that the husband and I are, in fact, time idiots?

Yesterday, the husband had to be up early to go deal with some carpenters at work, who would be coming at 7 a.m. He set the alarm for 6:15, and got up without too much prodding from me. He left the house in the usual late-Fall pitch darkness, and made it there by 6:45. After nearly an hour of waiting, furious, he called up the foreman and got an answering machine. It was at this point he looked at his phone and noticed that the time, an hour after he’d arrived, was 6:45.

He had forgotten, for some reason, that he’d failed to set his alarm clock back when the time changed. Three weeks ago.

Time idiots, that’s us. Or maybe just lazy idiots.

The Swedish phrase for the day is kvart i sju, which would be written numerically as 6:45.

p.s. those bi-coastal wonders, East West, are back up and running in a new magazine format.

- by Francis S.

Last night, we met the guy from the Goethe Institute and his husband the South African publicist, as well as A. the assistant director and her fiancée, C., the photographer at a crowded table at Il Tempo, a restaurant the husband has been trying to get me to go to for years. We toasted to the promotion at work of the guy from the Goethe Institute, then off we ran to go see Hable con ella.

It always takes some emotional preparation to see an Almodóvar film, although I am inevitably impressed once I actually see it. Last night was no exception. It was melodramatic, strange, desperate, moving, a bit overwrought and had the usual perversely hopeful ending. Interestingly, he’s dropped the camp completely, which, depending on your perspective, allows for more subtlety of emotion. And he seems to have stopped giving the city of Madrid such a flamboyant role in his films as well – the hot oranges and pinks and reds are considerably toned down. Instead you have the Argentinian actor Darío Grandinetti, who is superb, his eyes and mouth constantly betraying a terrible and profound sadness, but ultimately not an inconsolable sadness.

It was Almodóvar who made me want to live in Spain. And although I hated and loved it all at once, I definitely was not disappointed when I finally did live there.

The Swedish phrase for the day is rörd till tårar. It means moved to tears.

- by Francis S.

Swedes seem to have an innate love of California, particularly Los Angeles. It is, no doubt, the promise of such endless sun. (Me, though a Chicagoan by upbringing and nature, I have the east-coast horror of L.A., a place which seems to value the buffed and tanned surface of things and deplores the intellectual. I'm a terrible snob when it comes to L.A. and obviously don't mind pissing off a good many people by saying so.)

Unlike Swedes, the promise of endless sun scares me. I love the changing of the seasons. Like the tremendous Frankenstein Christmas tree - put together from smaller trees - that is being put up on Gamla Stan's waterfront, a meter away from the spot where we played boule the past summer with the husband's agent: a perfect juxtaposition, icon of summer next to icon of winter.

The Swedish word for the day is strålande. It means radiant.

- by Francis S.

Sex makes the Internet go round. And you love to read about sex, don't you? I know I do. Even when I'm shocked when someone like Jane announces to the world that, in a fit of debauchery and after perhaps a few too many bottles of wine, she kissed a man for the first time. And then slept with him. (Uh, well, she only really did sleep with him, nothing more.)

Which put me in mind of my own days of debauchery. I did have a girlfriend when I was in my last years of high school. And we did sort of, well, get naked together. Which was fun, actually, although not nearly as fun as it was, and still is, to get naked with some guy, which these days would mean my husband, if you don't include the visits to the doctor, which actually are not more fun than being naked with a girl.

The last woman I got naked with was a certain MJ, when I was 22. I was supposed to be at home with my then-boyfriend. Instead, I got drunk with MJ and ended up at 7 a.m. the next morning hungover and smelling like sex. With a woman. My then-boyfriend was not amused. He never quite forgave me for it, not in the 13 years we were together.

So, my pretties, it's really easy for us homosexualists to write about crossing the line into decency and respectability, our fellow homosexualists are rarely shocked by such revelations. And, I am ashamed to say, I am in fact unduly proud of the fact, as if it made me more of a man. (I hate it when I exhibit this kind of vague internal homophobia, but what the hell. It's how I feel.)

Now it's your turn. Fess up. I want to hear about the last time all you big girls and big boys crossed the line, whichever line it may be for you.

Be brave.

Be honest.

Be really explicit and dirty. C'mon, titillate me. I could really use some entertainment these days.

- by Francis S.

Yesterday, as the husband and I were out shopping for clothes, for presents to take with us to America, for CDs and books and generally enjoying the fact that we had gotten up and out of bed and onto the streets before ten on a grey Saturday morning, we ended up in a kitchen store looking at monstrously large white salad bowls and chargers and coffee cups. Which gave me the idea of having a dinner party with all this outsized china and silver serving spoons and forks and knives. Wouldn't it be fun? The trick would be coming up with food that takes up volumes on a plate, but is reduced to nothing in the stomach. Soufflés? Rocket salads? Turkey drumsticks?

The Swedish verb for the day is att duka. It means to set the table.

- by Francis S.

The husband and I brought dinner to the priest last night: chicken paprika and rice and a batch of chocolate chip cookies all carefully laid up in plastic containers. Her husband, the policeman, was working the night shift, so she was alone with the baby for the second night of her life.

"I'm learning how to do everything with one hand," she said. "But it isn't easy." She's also learning how to deal with sleep deprivation, which isn't easy either, apparently. It is truly amazing how this little animal, three weeks old, can be so dependent, can demand so much attention, she said.

The priest is a worrier. She's worried that Signe will inherit her own worrying view of the world and not the sunny outlook of the policeman.

She will undoubtedly be her own person, I said. And I, who have a sunny outlook similar to the policeman's, happen to find worriers awfully interesting people.

"Yes, well, it may look interesting to you but it's no fun for me," the priest said, laughing. "And I certainly don't wish it on Signe."

The Swedish word for the day is föräldraskap. It means parenthood.

- by Francis S.

She sent me an e-mail saying that we should meet for a drink. It took weeks for me to answer, but when I said yes, it turned out that she knows the South African publicist, who she said could vouch for her good character.

So I sat in WC Bar (the toilet, she called it) and waited, smoking a bit nervously.

I had no reason to be nervous.

"I feel as if I know you," she said the moment she arrived. "I don't usually meet people from the Internet. Uh, I mean, I never have before."

She laughed. She made me laugh. We told how we ended up in love and in Sweden, which were connected of course. The drink turned into dinner at one of my favorite spots, Little Persia, where the service is abysmally slow but the food worth the wait. The husband joined us midway through the meal.

"I am Filipino-Hungarian," she told us. She said she is, in fact, a rare animal. "I think there's another one in the Northwest Territories in Canada somewhere."

It's fun meeting people from the Internet.

The Swedish word for the day is vänskap. It means friendship.

- by Francis S.

The city is dusted with snow and the Christmas tree is up in Mosebacke Square, albeit bereft of lights.

Tis the season? It's only November 11! And I thought Americans were bad about jumping the gun on the biggest consumer event of the year.

The Swedish phrase for the day is grattis på födelsedag, mamma. Which means happy birthday, mom.

- by Francis S.

There is no middle ground with Björk for most people, it's either love or hate. Me, I like the idea of her. Brilliant, intellectual, primal, uncompromising, challenging, musically sophisticated. But she's more fun to listen to than to listen to - I mean that what she says about what she does is easier to take than what she actually does, mostly.

"Mediterranean passion has been well documented, but nordic passion hasn't," she has said. She says Nordic passion is like a submarine, it runs deep.

A fascinating thought, that. My friend, the guy from the Goethe Institute, claims that it's hard to pick out gay Swedish men passing on the street because Swedes as a whole act so terribly asexual - his gaydar is useless here. Which doesn't contradict what Björk says, although apparently the passion runs too deep for my friend's tastes (or abilities).

I think what's so confusing for the outside world is that Swedes are just practical about sex, there's nothing mysterious about it to them. Which isn't to say that they can't be passionate. It's just a different kind of passion, as Björk says.

The Swedish word for the day is andra. It means second or another.

- by Francis S.