I dreamt that I was eating dinner at a crowded and vast table, elbow to elbow with Queen Elizabeth, and although I was trying very hard to be dainty, I accidentally brushed against her with my arm.

She went ballistic, screaming at me "no one touches me!"

What the hell was that all about?

The Swedish word for the day is matsal. It means dining room.

- by Francis S.

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"Here," the husband said, handing me a grimy packet of chewing gum, cinnamon-flavored, my favorite.

Where did that come from, I asked.

It turns out he'd brought it back from New York when he was there in April and he'd unearthed it from a bag somewhere where he'd forgotten it.

The strange thing in Sweden is that there is no cinnamon-flavored candy of any sort. They much prefer licorice that has been laced with ammonia-y salt.

And now, as I start thinking about fixing a curry for tonight's dinner party - a mix of caraway seed, cloves, bay leaves, cinnamon sticks, cardemom, fresh ginger, garlic and onion, turmeric, saffron and ground cashews - I'm wondering what makes a culture choose to love a certain spice above others? Why wasn't I raised to have a sweet tooth for caraway- or saffron- or ginger-flavored chewing gum?

Interestingly, chewing gum doesn't go stale, sitting in a bag somewhere for five or six months.

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

- by Francis S.

I'm going through some kind of strange memento mori stage: As I walk down the street, I look at all the handsome young men and for some reason I can only see what they'll look like when they're, say, 75. All burnished and balding and sagging a bit.

What would Freud say?

The Swedish word for the day is knasig. It means wacky.

- by Francis S.

Last week, we went to a funeral, a woman who was the beloved grandmother and mother of close friends of ours. In Sweden, men wear black suits with black or white ties and everyone carries a flower or bouquet - in most cases, a single white rose - that is laid on the coffin one by one as each mourner walks past and pays respect toward the end of the service.

Though I hardly knew her, I shed a few tears, mostly at my friends' pain.

The way we mark death is so peculiar, invoking God with a few weakly sung psalms, and then coffee and sandwiches and sherry and small talk. Death has been so removed from life, we really don't know what to make of it. Not that I have any decent alternative to what we do.

Maybe getting good and drunk and accidental rending of garments?

The Swedish word for the day is tvärtom. It means on the contrary.

- by Francis S.

This explains everything. George W. Bush as a prep school brat playing at gangbanging: "People dying right now 'cause I said so, that's my work. Fuck New York. This apple aint so big." (hats off to Kip for the link.)

The countdown has started. Only one week until the Republican National Convention.

The Swedish word for the day is protest. It needs no translation.

- by Francis S.

I wonder if The Tinkerbell Hilton Diaries will ever be released in Sweden? And will the author, madman and wag about town Dong Resin, be coming to Stockholm on a worldwide book tour?

Nah.

The Swedish phrase for the day is ett visst antal. It means a certain number.

- by Francis S.

If it's raining in the morning, or I'm just too tired, instead of walking I take the bus. Even if I have to wait a bit, I take the No. 42 instead of the No. 4, even though the No. 4 is one of those buses that bends in the middle. It's that the No. 42 has a nicer route, taking Karlavägen, with its row of linden trees in the middle, its bronze statues (nearly all women in some stage of undress, but there is one naked man with an enviable physique), snobby little shops and cafés, and troops of little old ladies walking tiny dogs of one sort or another.

The Swedish word for the day is alldeles. It means completely.

- by Francis S.

It's a great big slumber party over here: The priest and the policeman came home from a month in Finland to find their apartment flooded, so while everything is being fixed, they're here for a week, complete with toddler and crib, camping out in the spare bedroom.

I know how fun and exhausting it is to hang out with someone who's been on this earth for, oh, about 20 months. But I forgot that I would look forward to coming home from work so much, the sound of the little feet of my goddaughter come running when I unlock the front door, to see that grubby little face and that waddling kind of diaper run she does, to hear her calling out to see if it's me.

Or to be honest, calling out to see if it's the husband, not me.

This could have something to do with the fact that the night before, as she sat on my lap while we ate sushi, I failed to notice that she had grabbed a great gob of wasabi from my plate until she started screaming after she'd stuffed it into her mouth.

I think she's going to have a lifelong fear of green gooey stuff, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

But me, what kind of godfather am I?

I just found a little half-eaten cheese and butter sandwich tucked away on a low shelf in the old maid's room.

I'm in love with her, my goddaughter.

The Swedish word for the day is trotsålder. We call it the terrible twos in the States. She's got less than four months to go.

- by Francis S.

Fashion trend or unpleasant coincidence? In the past week I've seen four different people, four, wearing black shirts with vivid orange flames, shirts that look exactly like the "uniforms" the kids behind the Burger King counter wear.

Maybe I'm just hopelessly out of sync with what's hip.

The Swedish phrase for the day, pommes frites, is actually French. Americans call them french fries, the Brits call them chips.

- by Francis S.

"Ladies bathed before noon, after their three o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft tea-cakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum."

As if to make up, in just a couple of days, for all the cold weather we had during the summer, it's turned hot, truly hot. And when it's hot like this, I can't help conjuring Harper Lee's sentence in my mind, about the ladies as sweat- and talcum-frosted tea-cakes. I think ever since I read that, when I was 11 or so, I've kept that image in my mind, of what hot really is.

I re-read To Kill a Mockingbird a couple of weeks ago. It hasn't lost any of its bittersweet punch, it still stings the heart.

The Swedish word for the day is intryck. It means impact.

- by Francis S.

The Oracular Vagina takes her place among world leaders.

It's probably easier to understand if you start at the beginning, and work your way to the top. Probably.

The Swedish word for the day is hårvård, which may look like an Ivy League university with a couple of extra circles, but in fact means hair care in English.

by Francis S.

Though I've been damned neglectful for the past months, it would be a shame if I didn't bother to mark the day.

Happy third birthday, blog.

The Swedish word for the day is tveksam. It means hesitant.

- by Francis S.

The summer's come and gone. To be more accurate, it never really quite arrived. There were no stretches of sunshiney days, everytime it seemed to start, it would be cut short by grey and cool and melancholy weather that helps one understand the problem of high suicide rates in this country. Not that I mind now, exactly. The dreariness of the summer will hit me in November.

So I sit, with a stubborn cough and a book (bad-boy book critic Dale Peck's Martin and John which, in the British edition I just bought, has been titled Fucking Martin, a change that I can't even hazard a guess as to the reasoning behind it), lolling about on the sofa in the library in our apartment while it rains outside. Remembering last week when I showed my beloved little brother how we were sitting, on the library sofa in the apartment, at exactly that obliquely angled point on the map where Odengatan runs into Odenplan.

Bizarre, how pleasureable it is to sit on a sofa in a shallow curve of windows that one can point to so directly on a map and say "we are sitting exactly there." Or here.

The Swedish word for the day is ont i halsen. It means sore throat.

- by Francis S.

While searching among a raft of old e-mail, I came across a message from my friend Edu, sent a year or so before he died.

How peculiar and unsettling a feeling it gave me.

I was unable to make myself read the mail, although my first thought was to reply.

But what to ask or say? "I think of you often" or "Are you still out there, somehow?" or "Are we sad and loathesome animals, when seen from afar, or pitiful, or beautiful?" or "Can one still be full of emotion, longing, wit, and irrational after death, really?"

In the end, I didn't send anything, nor did I read the mail.

The Swedish word for the day is själ. It means soul.

- by Francis S.

The way to Korpo Island in the vast Finnish archipelago begins with a flight into Turku. Roughly the equivalent of say, Providence, Rhode Island, Turku has an equally faded if a far more glorious past. A cursory 45-minute stroll in grey summer drizzle, the cheap Swedish brands in the tired shops clustered around the main square, the desperate-looking stalls in the middle of the square, everything exudes that cranky, weighed-down feel of a minor provincial city, the people somehow more suspicious and unfriendly than in a place more cosmopolitan and sure of itself.

You can take a bus from downtown Turku to get to Korpo, or if you happen to be going to a wedding, you can hitch a ride with fellow wedding guests whom you've never met before, who were given a description of you by the bride and told to look out for you, which in fact one of them did, asking you to join them.

In the car, a trans-Atlantic mix of Spaniard, Brit, Canadian, Swede, it will take a ferry ride to Nagu Island, and then a second ferry ride before you'll reach Korpo, the occupants of the car pre-occupied with getting there on time and catching up on the details of what has happened in their lives since they last saw each other, some of them nearly a decade ago. You will listen politely, putting in a word here and there when appropriate.

Korpo itself will be far greener than you expected, farms and cows and cottages and the sea, side by side by side by side. The church on Korpo, stone and some 800 years old, is more ancient than you had imagined, the bride even more beautiful and the priest, your good friend, will be no longer nervous about getting everything perfect for her little sister the bride, which somehow then makes everything perfect even if the organist has surpassed the awfulness of the organist at a wedding you were at in Malaysia once, playing very badly an ugly Finnish march by an obscure Finnish composer called Melartin, a march that lasts some five minutes longer than it takes for the bride and groom to make it to the altar.

Afterwards, you will be charmed by the old manor house in which the reception takes place - pink on the outside and rough and elegant on the inside, the room in which you eat dinner sporting a column with a visible bullet hole from a long-past civil war, and at one time having been the scene of Jean Sibelius playing the piano. There will be no electric lights, only candles, giving the scene an impossibly romantic and painterly and antique air, though it gets no darker than early dusk at the darkest point of the evening, everyone's eyes glittering and cheeks flushed and outlines cast in deep shadow.

You will be exhausted by the length and number of the speeches, which make the dinner last some six hours, but your dinner companions make up for it - a young woman from Amsterdam on your left who makes your favorite speech of the evening, and on your right the aunt of the bride, a retired war correspondent from Prague who in the early seventies studied film for four years on a Fullbright Scholarship at your Alma Mater, New York University.

You'll marvel at the crowd, a curious mix of upper-middle class Swedes - lawyers and bankers and high-level political advisors like the bride - and upper-middle class Finland-Svensk Finns of a certain left-ish, idiosyncratic and intellectual bent. Plus a bunch of upper-middle class foreigners like yourself.

You will drink too much red wine, and talk about what it is to live in a country that is not really your own, how no place is home anymore, how difficult it is to maintain a social welfare state. You'll laugh as your little goddaughter waves down the table at you, everyone thinking she's waving to them but you alone knowing that it's you and no one else.

Then you'll dance with great fervor and laugh at the bride doing her famous Britney Spears dance routine (danced not with her husband, but with your friend the Policeman). You dance so much and talk with so many interesting people that you'll somehow manage, through bad luck mostly and by 4:30 a.m. now in a decidedly foul mood, to end up sleeping beside the bride's other sister in her messy room at the family compound of the bride's family rather than in the best room at a lovely seaside hotel - painted wooden floors, windows onto the tiny harbor - on Nagu, an island away.

You'll wake up two hours later in your suit, sweaty and greasy and cold all at the same time, unable to see because you took out your contact lenses before passing out, and your friend the priest walks you up to the road where you can catch a bus back to the hotel, and she fills you in on all sorts of family gossip that helps to make sense of some of the night before.

The bus will take you back, and after a shower and a change of clothes, the whole dreamlike ending of the night before will no longer be annoying but rather, you're sure, become a great story to tell, especially after the hotel gives you a discount on account of you didn't mess up the beds.

After the brunch with the rest of the pale and hungover guests at the family compound (which, with your contact lenses in you can now see is unsurpassingly beautiful, a whole bay they have to themselves, somehow more melancholy, more full of soul than the islands off Stockholm, which are what make it more beautiful), and all the driving back and forth on roads and ferries into Korpo, and then back again to Nagu and finally into Turku, and the plane ride home - a propeller plane, your first in years and years and years - you will be happy to be home, to your own bed and your own husband.

The way to and from Korpo is long and complicated, but it is well worth every second.

The Swedish word for the day is äventyr. It means, of course, adventure.

- by Francis S.

Summer has begun - cloudy, cool, tenuous - all the hard work preparing for the weeks and weeks off is done.

My parents, who were here for a visit, have come and gone. As has midsummer, which we celebrated out on Ornö, a perfect day with sun and all the proper accoutrements: birch branches cut from trees in a wood above a little inlet on the island, the branches wired to the midsummer pole while flowers were wrapped into wreathes by my mother and the editor from Wallpaper, who was in from London without her husband, who was shooting pictures for a magazine in Australia; there was herring and more herring, and snaps and me leading most of the singing with the few drinking songs I know, and then the putting up of the pole and the dancing around it and the games. The island showed itself off to perfection for my parents, and the guests were charming and full of stories.

Along with midsummer, we gave dinners and went to dinners and drank bottles and bottles of red wine. We climbed through the attic and up to the top of the tower at Nordiska Museet and saw Stockholm from on high courtesy of a friend who works at the museum, me clinging to the walls and afraid to grab the railing and look down. We shopped at the market at Hötorget where my parents bought flowers to put in boxes on the front balcony. We heard a lecture at Sofiakyrkan, and my parents met the husband's nephew, the priest and the policeman and their daughter who is our goddaughter. My father fixed countless doorhandles, the front door, the lamp in the dining room and hung a heavy piece of art on the wall.

They left yesterday morning, leaving at 6 a.m. in a taxi.

The husband and I are alone in the apartment for the first time, as the lodger is at a wedding in the States. We spent the day inside, watching movies, hardly bothering to look for the sun between the clouds.

Summer has begun.

The Swedish phrase for the day is det samma. It means likewise.

- by Francis S.

Last weekend, the husband threw a big party at work and had our former neighbor, L., the chef, cater the food. Which she did with her usual panache, I heard - I was at the 25th birthday of a pop star, sipping soup and yammering away with a half-Danish, half-American girl who is a VJ on MTV Europe. I can yammer with the best of them, but it turns out I am an old fart, without a doubt.

But that's all beside the point. Which is that when we went to return to L. all the heaps of Moroccan bowls and plates and platters, the glasses and the elaborate footed metal steam tray that had been used at the husband's party, it meant going back to our old neighborhood on Söder and, worse, seeing the old apartment house.

It was most peculiar walking up the steps and then looking out the window at the courtyard, which is beautiful and green and new and so much nicer than our current courtyard.

And then looking at the galleys for L.'s cookbook that is coming out in the fall, walking in L,'s apartment through rooms with different colored walls, different furniture and different tile, but nonetheless are virtually the same as the rooms in our old flat, more peculiar still.

It felt a bit small, a bit low to me.

It felt sad to the husband, who is still mourning the move.

I figure he'll have recovered sometime in November.

In the meantime, I plan to enjoy every minute.

The Swedish words for the day are gullviva, mandelblom, kattfot, blå viol. They mean cowslip, meadow saxifrage, cat's foot, wild violet.

- by Francis S.

It turns out, to turn T.S. Eliot on his head, that the universe started not with a bang but a whimper. Or rather a whine... at least musically, according to Mark Whittle, a researcher who's somehow reduced the Big Bang and subsequent millenia into an audible soundwave analysis.

Here, listen for yourself.

The Swedish phrase for the day is i början. It means in the beginning.

- by Francis S.

Yesterday was Sweden's national day, a day when this nation of people who seem to have a horror of nationalism celebrate their country. Of course Swedes believe that the Swedish way of doing things is the fairest and best way, but it's not something to celebrate, it's something that just is. There's no such thing as a "Basic Truth" day, after all.

Still, they're not 100 percent sure that the Swedish way of doing things is the fairest and best way; they do have plenty of complaints about the Swedish way of doing things.

So, these apparently two contradictory emotions are surely contributing factors to the fact that the national day isn't even a bank holiday, although this is supposed to change sometime in the future, when one of the more obscure religious bank holidays - Ascension or Pentecost - will be booted from the vacation-day calendar.

Outside parliament, a hundred Aryan-nation types were arrested (scroll down a little to read the article). I guess they were celebrating by attacking some leftist demonstrators in an attempt to make up for the rest of the country's lack of jingoist fervor.

Me, I celebrated by attending a ceremony at City Hall (in the Blue Hall where they have the Nobel Prize ceremony) for the latest crop of new Swedish citizens. Surrounded by hundreds of people from all over the world, we were welcomed by various low-level politicoes and serenaded by fellow immigrants, mostly in English. Then we sang the national anthem and they fed us salmon and gave us sparkling wine, and I got a certificate with my name misspelled.

I said all of about 50 words during the whole thing: I spoke for about 15 seconds to the guy sitting next to me, a Finn who has lived in Sweden for 30 years. I asked him why he was getting his citizenship now, and he said it was because damn Finland finally allowed dual citizenship. Although I had thought it was Sweden that finally allowed dual citizenship. And then I said thanks later to the politician who gave me the certificate.

Yet somehow, it was pleasing and awkward and ever so Swedish in the self-consciously un-Swedishness of the whole event, despite the singing the national anthem.

I was charmed, and even a bit proud, even if that is a most un-Swedish sentiment to have.

The Swedish word for the day is Sveariket, a word from which the name Sverige - the Swedish word for Sweden - is derived. It was an area of Sweden inhabited by the Svear, an area that seems to be the equivalent of today's central Sweden and the six provinces of Svealand: Dalarna, Närke, Södermanland, Uppland, Värmland and Västmanland

- by Francis S.