Memories of Christmas Trees

Advent Calendar / 5 December 

This is another page in my first photo album, from the Christmas when I was 16 months old. (Compare yesterday’s post.)

Mum’s drawing of the Christmas tree brings back memories, too. They used to have Swedish flags in the tree, like that, pinned into the tops of a twig. (Getting them in there, usually came with some -  well, let’s call it ‘muttering between the teeth’ - because the end of that flagstick was sharp, and so were the needles on the spruce!)

I think the tree depicted might have been inspired by my paternal grandparents’ tree, because they used to have those old-fashioned sweet-wrapper kind of ornaments, and the small “tomte”/Santa figures made of yarn; and I think back in those days they also did still have real candles in the tree, not electric ones.

 

       

The tree at my other grandparents’ house was different. For one thing they must have had electric candles in theirs, because what I remember best about it is that they covered every little light-bulb with something called “angel’s hair”. I guess it was meant to resemble snow. I can’t find any picture of that.

Our Christmas tree at home was kept rather strict. Mum and dad did not want all kinds of ‘odd’ ornaments in it. I guess they thought that would disrupt the symmetry of things. However, when we moved into a bigger house, we used to have a second, smaller tree in the kitchen as well. In that one my brother and I were allowed to hang our own strange and wonderful creations from school, or other odd pieces of decoration. What those might have been, I hardly remember any more. Only that they were not to be mixed with the “proper” ornaments in the big tree.

- Now this is a “proper” classic Christmas ornament! -

The Christmas tree was not put up, or at least not decorated, until the day before Christmas Eve. Traditionally I think parents did this after the children had gone to bed, so that it was just there as a surprise in the morning. My memories, however, include a lot of muttering, not only about those flags, and the star at the top, but also about getting the tree itself to stand straight, and getting the light-chain untangled (it really is a mystery how a carefully folded light-chain always seems to manage to tie itself into knots all by itself in its box from one Christmas to another – but I suppose it gets bored, having nothing else to do for so long!), and then getting the lights evenly distributed across the tree, and… Well.

The first ten years of my adult life, I never spent Christmas in my own flat, and I never bothered about getting a Christmas tree. My own personal traditions came to be centered more around Advent than the actual Christmas. I was also somewhat “allergic” to Santa/gnome-figures, so for many years didn’t have any of those either. (I blogged about this last year in The Return of the Gnomes.)

Now since many years I have a small artificial tree, only 60 cm high, which I do decorate every Christmas. It serves me well enough! I usually put it up just a few days before Christmas. Never this early. The whole point of the Advent time in December for me is that it is supposed to be a gradual thing… Just like the Advent calendar.

Christmas Gifts and Memories

Advent Calendar / 4 December

Behind the door in my advent calendar today was someone who came bearing gifts.

♥ Were Christmas gifts important in your childhood traditions?
♥ Can your remember any special gifts in the past?
♥ What about now, how do you feel about Christmas gifts?

Thanks to my mother, I remember some of the things I got for Christmas when I was 16 months old. Besides putting photos in an album for me, she also added some extra drawings:

“Oh, so many Christmas presents!”

I remember some of these toys. The two look-alike dolls, one big, one small… They were both stuffed with straw, with celluloid faces; not quite as soft as many modern cuddly toys, and certainly not as washable. With time, they got rather worn and dirty, and I think mum had some struggle getting me to give them up eventually! (When, I cannot say.) The big doll was named Britta, and the small one Anna. That is not written down anywhere, that’s just still in my head. Both names occur in a well-known story by our beloved children’s book author Astrid Lindgren. But I can’t have known that at the age of 16 months. Can I? (At what age do little girls start giving names to their dolls?) The little round baby doll I have no memory of except for this picture.

The dachshund on wheels was made of wood and that one I think had rather a long life. Might even have been inherited by my brother (six years my junior). Or did he have his own? The leash used to get tangled up in the wheels. The cat was also made of wood, and that you could pick apart and put together again.

Nowadays I neither buy nor receive a lot of Christmas gifts. There are a couple of friends I usually exchange a small something with, just for fun… (Neither of us have any children or grandchildren.)

I can’t help it, I still like the anticipation of opening parcels… Perhaps I should wrap some for myself this year. Mind you, that doesn’t mean one has to go out and buy all new stuff… I’m thinking I might wrap up some of the DVD’s or books I’ve already got waiting, that I have not seen or read yet (or that I want to re-watch, or reread). Or CD’s I haven’t listened to for a while. If I make the parcels now, I might even have forgotten by Christmas what’s in each of them. It looks like I’ll be spending Christmas  on my own this year. Or most of it, anyway. In any case, it will be different from Christmases past. I think it might actually be a good idea to prepare some half-random half-surprises for myself. Not all to be opened at once, but when or if I get slammed by the feeling that I don’t quite know what to do next!

Something Birthday to Us

 

 

29 August, 1931, a little baby boy was born. My dad.

Exactly 24 years later, a little baby girl was born. Me. (Held by my grandmother in the picture.)

It’s not always a barrel of laughs sharing your birthday with another family member. Growing up, I very rarely got to have a birthday party “of my own”, with friends. (For relatives, the “two for one” was probably practical.) In my 20s and 30s, when I did not live in the same town as my parents, I made up for it with quite a few birthday parties with friends, no family (the family celebrations often held either before or after the actual day). At 40 I had my only really big party (about 40 people), including both family and friends. At 50, I went away to celebrate with a few old friends.

Had circumstances been different, I might have tried to make a bit more of turning 55 - also being born in 1955.

Circumstances being what they are, however…

First I allowed myself a very lazy morning. I did not get up (properly) until noon! This was not really because I felt all miserable, but spoiling myself.

Then I went out and bought myself a big bouquet of flowers and enjoyed that while I ate my lunch (which in itself was not all that special).

Then I split the bouquet in half, and in the mid afternoon took one half of it with me on a 45 min bus tour across town, to “celebrate” for an hour with dad at the short-stay nursing home (and then another bus ride home again).

I asked dad if he remembered what day it was. He said yes, but did not elaborate. (I’m not sure, I think the staff might have talked to him about it after I phoned earlier in the day.)

Anyway I suppose it was good I went to see him even if neither of us was exactly in happy birthday mood.

I tried to tell dad briefly about the moving plans, even brought him a couple of pictures of his new place. He again said “yes” but again I’m not sure how much he really takes in. Don’t know how much help photographs are either. Most of the time he sat staring out of the window. I don’t think his eyesight is very good either now. Or perhaps it is mine that isn’t! The thing is that while I see the black roof of the next building in front of some green treetops, dad seems to be seeing a lake. And of course that is really a much better view than mine! It’s just one of those reality clashes that is difficult to handle in conversation “right there and then”…

Going home on the bus, the pictures in my first photo album came to mind. Mum put the baby photo of dad in there for comparison. I’m not sure whether they took the photo of me deliberately in that position, with the old photo in mind, or if it just “happened” that way. My paternal grandfather was a good photographer (and journalist at the local newspaper).

Not to leave you with too sad an impression of my not-exactly-happy birthday, I should probably mention that five birthday cards and one parcel arrived for me before the weekend; and some phone calls have been dropping in as well. One friend even singing to me on the phone! So I’m not really feeling “forgotten”. Just too tired for partying.

Onwards and Backwards

Yesterday was another day of phone calls + a visit to the hospital. I talked to a nurse at the hospital in the late morning, and then twice with the municipality's assistance evaluator, in between which she in turn had investigated the options at hand just now.

Result: Tomorrow dad will be moved to a short-stay nursing home for a month. His problems include general weakness and increasing dementia. He had fallen a couple of times at home over the weekend so that's why the home care nurse decided on Monday to send him to the hospital. Tests and X-rays showed nothing new though. Some attempts at training will be made at the short-stay nursing home. Then a new evaluation will be made to decide if he can go back home as before (with home care) or if other arrangements will have to be made.

The short-stay nursing home is in town - across town from me, and further away than the hospital – but I will be able to visit more often than in his home village.    

Lucky coincidence in the midst of all the unlucky is that my brother starts his summer holiday next week anyway and will be able come down and stay in the house for a few days. 

Later in the afternoon I went to the hospital to see dad. He was asleep most of the 1½ hour I sat there. During the few minutes he was awake I tried to ask him if he knew where he was, if he remembered what had happened the day before. He had no recollection of it. I soon realized that any discussion of details was pointless. I think he recognized that it was I who was there but I'm not even 100% sure about that. When I left he was fast asleep again. (As were two of the three other elderly gentlemen in the room. Imagine the sound…) I left a bar of dark chocolate and some pastilles I know he used to like on his table as a visible sign that I - or someone! - had been there…

.~.~.~.

… I remember, way back from my childhood, the taste and smell from those liquorice pastilles - a little too sharp for my taste back then, but associated with early memories of dad. He used to keep a box in his breast pocket - Läkerol Original, back then they came in metallic boxes . (Since then there have been - probably dozens of new tastes?) I also remember that he always preferred dark chocolate to milk chocolate. A fragment of memory from some train journey... Milk chocolate for me*, dark for dad...

*(Nowadays I only buy dark chocolate myself, since in my late thirties I developed lactose intolerance.)

 

A Bit of Family History

After looking at my blog pictures of the Town Hall centenary (see previous post), my aunt pointed out to me that my maternal grandmother, back in the 1920’s, worked as a secretary in this very building.

This is a photo of my grandmother at work.  Thought it might be fun to include that here, since you have already been shown the building!

I borrowed my aunt’s family album a couple of years ago and quick-copied some of the photos and notes in it using my digital camera. So my copies aren’t top quality. The ones I’m showing here I have tried to edit a little using Picasa, to make them sharper; and adding new frames in Windows Live Writer. 

 

Here’s another photo of my grandmother from the 1920s which I like.
I asked my aunt if she knew any details about the car, but unfortunately she doesn’t. If any old car enthusiast among my readers has an idea about what kind of car it is, please comment!

Wedding picture from 1928.

A fun piece of family history is that my maternal grandparents got to know each other by a newspaper ad leading to correspondence between them using shorthand/stenography!

My grandfather was from the north of Sweden, and in his youth worked at a sawmill up there; but went on to study to become a teacher (and later in life headmaster). My grandmother lived down here in the south. When my mother was born the family was living up north; but a year or so after that they moved down here.

My grandmother died when I was 6 years old, only a few months before my brother and my oldest cousin were born (my cousin just before Christmas and my brother three weeks later). So I’m the only grandchild to have some memories of my own of my grandmother.
(My grandfather later remarried.)

In a interview from another blogger about a year ago, I shared a childhood memory that included this set of grandparents. I decided to repeat it here, and include a picture that I did not have back then:

What is your favourite childhood memory?

Some people seem to have their childhood all sorted out in a series of stories. For me it's more like scattered snapshot images and I think they often involve something that seemed a bit unusual or new to me at the time. Quite a few early images are connected with visits to other people's houses.

The surroundings where my maternal grandparents lived changed dramatically while I was growing up. When I was little, their house was one of just two in otherwise rural surroundings, with a view overlooking fields with cows and haystacks. As I grew older, the town kept coming closer and closer - blocks of flats towering up in the late 60's and early 70's, shopping centres and villas added, until the house my grandfather built back in the 30's was just one among many other houses in a suburban street.

An old photo of the view from my grandparents’ house (sent to me by my aunt). This is what it looked like in my early childhood. Since the 70s the view is quite different – actually reminding a bit of Lars Lerin’s suburban paintings that I just recently showed in another blogpost…

Other people own that house now since many years back. But whenever I am in that neighbourhood, a series of memory snapshots from the late 50's or very early 60's pop up in my head. Me walking with my grandfather over the fields on a sunny summer day, with an old-fashioned metal milk can, to fetch milk directly from a farm in the neighbourhood - "straight from the cows". (This was unusual to me, because in town, the milk in those days came in brown glass bottles with soft metal caps on top.) Opening wooden gates and shutting them. Stopping to pick wild strawberries. On the farm, two huge carthorses inside the stable (I see them from behind, standing in their boxes, towering up high above me - it's dark inside the stable with just some light coming in through the open door). My grandmother (who died when I was six) in their big kitchen, skimming the cream off the milk in a bowl on the workbench by the window overlooking the front garden. Tasting the lukewarm milk - I didn't much like it. Grandma making small pancakes in a special iron on the stove - no one else I knew made those. (My parents are not in the picture, I guess they had gone on a short summer holiday on their own and left me with Grandma and Grandpa.)

Once Upon A Time

80 years ago today, a little girl was born far up in the North of Sweden. Her name was Birgit. 25 years later, that girl herself became a mother. My mother. She died last year on 26 May, at the age of  79 years, three months and a few days; so did not live to celebrate her 80th birthday today.

The photo above shows my grandmother with my mother in 1930.
I borrowed my aunt's family album a couple of years ago and used my digital camera to copy some of the pictures in it. This one was originally black-and-white, but I chose a sepia tone in the editing for this post.

When I was born, my parents (married the year before) had just moved to a new town, only a couple of months before my birth, and my dad had just started a new job. Mum was at home with me, her first-born child, in a town where she knew no one at all except her husband, who was at work all day. To me, at the age of zero to five, this was probably the most natural thing in the world, because it was my world. It is only much later in life that I have sometimes wondered what it must have been like for her. The only company she had during the day was little me and the radio.

One thing my mother sometimes did back then, to amuse herself as well as me, was to draw pictures. When I was about 1½, she put some together into two little hand-made picture books, which I still have. She covered the pages with sticky tape, which was probably a good idea at the time. I doubt she considered the possibility of the books surviving 50 years, and what sticky tape might do to the colours in the long run!

Anyway. I scanned these pictures now, using some colour adjustments on the scanner; and then put  them together into four collages, which you will find below.

The picture books were based on me. I'm sure I loved to be in focus! The fun thing about them now is that they show glimpses of the flat we lived in, the furniture we had, the clothes I wore, and the toys I had at that age. And one thing you will notice is that my Mum kept a tight rein on me, quite literally!

The first book is still kept together by the original binding.
It shows the procedure of taking little me out for a walk.







The other one is a set of six pictures. I'm not sure if there were originally some more. There is no text but the pictures show details from our flat. The radio. My bedroom. Our living room. My parents' bedroom. The hall. And some of my favourite toys.

Memories are made of...

Not sure what you call this in English - the best word I find in the dictionary is probably just "hanging". Or would you say "tapestry" even though it's not woven? Anyway... It was made by my mother, some time back in my childhood. It's a sort of combined collage-quilt-embrodery-technique. I can't actually remember where it used to hang, if it had a special place at all. I happened to find it now on 1st Advent when rummaging through some drawers at dad's house looking for table cloths. Didn't find a good place to put it up there where he would see it anyway so I took it home with me. Handwashed and ironed it and put it up on the door to my study.

The landscape reminds me of another Christmas decoration from my early childhood which I think was found not worth saving when my parents moved in the early 90s. It was a little village of home made cardboard houses, church included, and little people made of home made play dough (flour, water and salt), dried in the oven and then painted with watercolour. Each Christmas, my mum cleared the top shelf of my bookcase, rolled out a layer of white cotton wool over it, and then we placed the houses on top and built the village. There was also a little dam made by a mirror, on which people were ice-skating.  When we'd built the landscape, we finished off by sprinkling some boric acid crystals on top which made it glitter, like snow when it's really cold outside.

Most Christmases we spent alternating between my grandparents' houses which were about 15 or 20 kms apart (and 100 kms away from where we lived). Going by car between those places, in the dark, my brother and I used to count lighted Christmas trees in the gardens we passed on the way. Not as many of those back then (in the 60s and early 70s) as there are nowadays...

About Me And Languages (1)

One or two Followers have wondered about me and languages. So I thought maybe I should fill in a few more details about that. I will do this by installments, so as not to tire either myself or my readers out…

Born to be a student!
(Me 9 months old, wearing student's cap.
It's my grandmother who's holding me.)

I am Swedish, at least four generations back on each side of the family, which is as far as I have any facts. Three out of my four grandparents had their roots in South West Sweden. The fourth moved down here from far up in the North.

My first contact with the English/American language was when I was six. (We also didn't have television until about then.) Then we had relatives from Illinois USA coming to visit - a cousin of my grandmother, and her husband and daughter. The daughter, second cousin of my mother, was only a few years older than I. There are pictures of us together drawing pictures and hugging teddy bears, and I remember her giving me American chewing gum. How else we communicated, I cannot really recall.

(Me on the left, my American relative on the right.)

I started school at the age of 7 but could read (Swedish) before that. English lessons began in 4th grade. My mother was good at English, she used to read novels in English herself and started early to encourage me to do the same. I was probably around 13 when I started reading Agatha Christie mysteries in English; we had a few of those at home. I also had penfriends in other countries. (In those days, contacts were made through ads in magazines and comic papers.)

When I was 14 (and my brother 7), our family went to London for a week in July, and saw all the sights: The Thames, Buckingham Palace, The Tower with the crown jewels, The Houses of Parliament, Big Ben, 10 Downing Street, Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum, The Planetarium, The Zoo,The British Museum, Trafalgar Square, Piccadilly Circus, Westminster Abbey, St Paul's Cathedral, Royal Albert Hall, Regent Park, Hyde Park… Also the Sherlock Holmes museum, the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, Hampton Court with its maze, Windsor Castle, Stratford-upon-Avon with Anne Hathaway's (Shakespeare's wife) cottage, and Agatha Christie's play The Mousetrap (which had been running for 17 years by then – and is still running, I think!)

In the Hampton Court Maze

Wow. Did we really do all that (and some shopping) in a week? According to my photo album, we did. I don't suppose I personally had a lot of conversation opportunies during that week; but it did lay a firm foundation for my continued fascination with all things British…

Midsummer's Eve

Midsummer Dance by Anders Zorn, 1897

In Sweden, Midsummer's Eve was formerly celebrated on June 23th, but since the 1950's on the Friday between June 19th and June 25th (and Midsummer's Day on the Saturday). It is probably the most uniquely Swedish of all our holidays. The main celebrations take place on the Friday, and traditionally include raising and dancing around a huge maypole (majstång), nowadays usually called midsummerpole (midsommarstång), decorated with leaves and flowers. The connection to fertility is naturally linked to the time of year.

Folk music is played and some people (especially folk musicians and dancers) wear traditional costumes. The menu usually includes pickled herring (which I never much liked, though), the first potatoes of the season, and the first strawberries. Many people also drink a lot of alcohol; but alcohol was never part of my own family traditions. Actually, come to think of it, neither was the maypole nor the dancing...! In my teens and later, though, I sometimes took part in bigger midsummer festivities, maypole dancing included. I especially remember the first midsummer I was allowed to spend with friends, and stay out all night. (I must have been 18 because I had got my driver's license; so I suppose no one could forbid me, really...) At that age especially, one is supposed to stay up all night (it's the shortest night of the year) and watch the sun rise early in the morning. It was exciting mainly because it was the first time. It was also cold and damp and a lot of mosquitoes...

Traditionally, Midsummer was thought to be one of the times of the year when magic was strong, so it was considered a good night to perform rituals to look into the future. For example, to pick a bouquet of seven or nine different flowers and put them under your pillow and then in your dream you would see your future spouse.

This year, I'm quite satisfied "celebrating" by just having a quiet day to myself, after the past very intense weeks. It's been raining most of the day anyway. I had chicken instead of herring (which, as I said above, I never liked), but I did have strawberries and icecream.

The neighbourhood is very quiet, I suppose most of the neighbours have gone away to celebrate.

At this age, I have no desire whatsoever to stay up all night; on the contrary, I very much hope I'll be able to go to sleep at my usual bedtime, and not wake up until well past the sunrise... ;-)

Connecting With History

This week I found a book at the local library about the history of the town where I live. Turns out the building in which I now live was finished in 1944, while World War II was still going on. I had a sort of "revelation" looking at pictures and reading quotations from newspaper articles back then. I always knew Sweden was not involved in the war but surrounded by it; and I think I've been sort of subconsciously assuming that everyday life must have been at some kind of standstill during those years, every major project put on hold, just waiting for the war to end...

But looking at the pictures in this book made me realize that even during the war, individuals as well as town council and government were still making plans for the future; people were not only having children and building houses and planning for towns to grow, but also paying attention to details like what kind of bricks to use for the facing, what kind of wood for the floors, even the choice of wallpaper… As well as building air raid shelters in the basement!


The building where I now live still gives a very "solid" impression, compared to for example the one from the early 70's where I lived before I moved here. The exterior still looks much the same as in the old photos. The interior has been renovated, but original details have been kept, like parquet floor in the living room, deep window ledges, wooden doorframes. But 2½ decades later, in the late 60's/ early 70's, the focus when building new apartment houses had shifted from "solid and lasting" to "fast and cheap" - and the materials to concrete, sheet metal, and plastic, plastic, plastic...

This week, with the help of my aunt, I also found the family grave of my great-grandparents, in an old cemetery close to where I live now. I never even knew they were buried there, until quite recently; and I would never have been able to find the grave by myself. Not only did they have a very common surname, the letters on the stone are so worn down that they are hardly visible any more.


I never met my great-grandparents, they died long before I was born. But I do remember visiting the house where they once lived (and where my grandmother grew up), back in my early childhood. Two of my grandmother's cousins were still living there then. Although as far as I was concerned, I don't think I even knew back then exactly how we were related to these "old ladies" that we used to visit sometimes. (They must have been about the same age then as I am now, I guess...)

The house does not exist any more, there is a petrol station now where it once lay. But recently, looking through a file of photos from a past exhibition at the local library, I suddenly came upon a picture of that house and its inhabitants, taken about 100 years ago. There were two families living in the house then; the children are my grandmother, her brother and their cousins. I scanned this from a xerox copy of a copy of a print… But it still gives an idea of what it looked like. It is a winter scenery with the smallest children sitting on sledges.

The Age Thing

My "Quotation of the Week" for this week (16/09, see post below), from Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine, is from a chapter about a 72 year old woman, who is trying to convince some children, that she, too, was once a little girl their age. She shows them some things she has kept – a ring, a comb, a picture – but they refuse to believe her. There is no proof, in their eyes, that the picture is not of some other person. In the end, it is the old woman who has to give in, remembering a discussion she once had with her husband (it is his words in the quotation). The only way she can become friends with the children is to "let go of her past" and agree with them that she has always been seventy-two:

At last they were good friends.
"How old are you, Mrs. Bentley?"
"Seventy-two."
"How old were you fifty years ago?"
"Seventy-two."

This is of course a little extreme, but dealing with time is a major theme in this novel: both children and old people are looking for ways to preserve their memories as well as catching the moment. (Making dandelion wine is one symbol of it: "Every time you bottle it, you got a whole chunk of 1928 put away, safe." )

When I first entered those lines into my quotation notebook, about being forever "trapped in the present", I was in my mid-twenties. Now I'm approaching my mid-fifties, and I'm still trying to figure out whether I really agree with the quotation or not. I do agree with the first sentence: "No matter how hard you try to be what you once were, you can only be what you are here and now." And probably, when I was nine, I found it hard to quite imagine what it would be like to be old. I do remember my grandmother showing me pictures of herself as a little girl, and finding it hard to really make the connection. As one grows older, though, surely the present self must still include all of the past selves? But at the same time we cannot go back; we cannot skip over the experiences we have already gathered; all we can do is keep adding to them, in the present. "You're in the present, you're trapped in a young now or an old now, but there is no other now to be seen."

Click on the label Dandelion Wine below for more quotes from this book.

Libraries and secret passages

Borrowing another writing prompt from the One-Minute-Writer:

Write about a childhood memory related to reading.
I used to borrow lots of books from the library. Enid Blyton was among my favourites (for a period). I still love libraries, and almost any story that has a secret passage in it... (the Blyton kids always seemed to find one of those).

Interview from one island to another

As promised in an earlier post, I have continued to randomly explore the Sea of Blogs. One of the places I enjoyed coming across (jumping from one blog to another) was another brand new island - Pan's Island - started the very same day as mine. What's the odds of that, I wonder?

So when on that blog I found a challenge to be interviewed, I accepted, and here is the result. Question's by Pan's Island, answers by me:


1) If you could take a one night trip to the island of dreams and nightmares in C.S. Lewis's Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and be guaranteed that you would only be there for one night - would you go and why? if not, why?
For just one night at a time, we all go there, every night - don't we?!

During one period of my life, I actually grew quite friendly with my dreams, nightmares included. The trick is bringing them out from under the bed at dawn before they disappear, and then getting them to repeat the message in broad daylight.

Write down what you remember, save the notes, and go back and compare them when you've gathered a few. If you have a literary mind, use the same kind of analysis as you do with poetry, and you will probably be amazed at your own mind's skills in coming up with images and parallells and wordgames.

Dream interpretation does involve quite a lot of active work, though, so often it seems easier when you wake up to just let the dreams slither away…


2) What is your favourite childhood memory?Some people seem to have their childhood all sorted out in a series of stories. For me it's more like scattered snapshot images and I think they often involve something that seemed a bit unusual or new to me at the time. Quite a few early images are connected with visits to other people's houses.

The surroundings where my maternal grandparents lived changed dramatically while I was growing up. When I was little, their house was one of just two in an otherwise rural surrounding, with a view overlooking fields with cows and haystacks. As I grew older, the town kept coming closer and closer - blocks of flats towering up in the late 60's and early 70's, shopping centres and villas added, until the house my grandfather built back in the 30's was just one among many other houses in a suburban street.

Other people own that house now since many years back. But whenever I am in that neighbourhood, a series of memory snapshots from the late 50's or very early 60's pop up in my head. Me walking with my grandfather over the fields on a sunny summer day, with an old-fashioned metal milk can, to fetch milk directly from a farm in the neighbourhood - "straight from the cows". (This was unusual to me, because in town, the milk in those days came in brown glass bottles with soft metal caps on top.) Opening wooden gates and shutting them. Stopping to pick wild strawberries. On the farm, two huge carthorses inside the stable (I see them from behind, standing in their boxes, towering up high above me - it's dark inside the stable with just some light coming in through the open door). My grandmother (who died when I was six) in their big kitchen, skimming the cream off the milk in a bowl on the workbench by the window overlooking the front garden. Tasting the luke warm milk - I didn't much like it. Grandma making small pancakes in a special iron on the stove - no one else I knew made those. (My parents are not in the picture, I guess they had gone on a short summer holiday on their own and left me with Grandma and Grandpa.)



3) If you found the one ring would you take up the quest yourself or wait to find someone better suited and aid them? And why?
I'm not sure it is always just a matter of choice. Often it seems (in the stories) that it is the ring that finds the bearer, as much as the other way round. Another point of a heroic tale is usually that the true hero does not think of himself as one, at least not from the start. Even Moses reacted with a "Who? You can't seriously mean me!" attitude when God spoke to him out of the burning bush. ("Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh? Who shall I say sent me? I've never been a man of words! Please send someone else!") King Arthur, Frodo, Harry Potter - the sword, the ring, the wand... The essence of the story is the same: They were chosen; in a way you could question whether they even had a choice; and yet their personal choice was of utmost importance…

Myself I'm not the kind of person who goes around looking for rings of power and I don't see myself as a hero(ine). Judging from the stories, that seems to be a very dangerous position! I think I'll just go into my wardrobe and hide - oh, wait - perhaps that's not the safest place either...


4) If you found a portal into another world what would you do? Would you take the risk and go through by yourself? Would you ask someone to go through with you? Would you tell the world or keep it a secret?
I actually didn't have to think very long about this one because it hit me that I'd already "been there, done that"…! I went through by myself, and told people afterwards, and my experience was much like Lucy's after coming back out of the wardrobe: Those who hadn't seen the other world for themselves were very reluctant to believe! I was 16, and my "portal" a simple prayer, no other people present at the time. Neither was I thinking of Narnia back then, because I never read those books until years later. Still, a door was opened to new thoughts, new adventures and new friends.

With Celtic-inspired fantasy now in mind, I'd still say that the thing about otherworldly portals is that if you happen to find one, you can never be quite sure how long it will remain open, or if anyone else will be able to see it. So if you hesitate and go ask someone else first, you might miss the opportunity.


5) If you had a choice between being alone for all of time or never being alone for all of time, which would you choose and why?
Even God started talking to himself after a while and decided he wanted company! ("Let us make man in our image, in our likeness..." Genesis 1:26)

I can often spend quite a lot of time by myself without getting too bored, but total independence of the rest of humanity is always an illusion. Even Defoe's Robinson Crusoe on his island only survived because of things made by other people that he salvaged from the wreck. Books, pens and ink among them…! ;-)

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Thanks to Pan's Island for the questions, I quite enjoyed answering them!

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If anyone who reads this would like to be interviewed by me in turn, let me know in a comment where to send the questions.