8 August 2010

Another day dawned and with a  prearrangement made the night before, the good doctor and Andy rose at  5 a.m to go kayaking on the lake and were lucky  enough to share the experience with a beaver who, it appears was totally unperturbed by this strange yellow beast elsewhere on the late. After the thrill of the dawn experience, the adventurous kayakers returned to their beds. The Irish, on the other hand, at least Simon and Nora, emulating Uno’s Caroline, took an early-morning plunge in the icy lake with, I suspect, more on their Uno’s lover!

Later that morning, Michael, who had been in town to refuel the car, returned  exultant having achieved what most of us take for granted in our own  backyard.. However, in Sweden it is all done with credit cards at the pump with the instructions written in Swedish  Somehow, Michael got through this arduous process without too long a queue of cars behind hooting impatiently and as a result returned here triumphant,

Today, the morning was spent by the Irish family collecting a huge bowl of raspberries from William’s garden in his  main house (Kallhagen) and the German family messed about in boats on the lake.

I spent the morning doing my blog and catching up on e-mails etc. In  the afternoon we went off to look at the little house owned by William (Akroken) which Michael is hoping to purchase. He had some ideas about extending it and it needed to look in situ, so to speak.

In the late afternoon our numbers swelled to 18. William came with his son Leo, 13, and Leo’s mother, Lena; by Kent, our nearest farmer neighbour and by Timi, a Finnish naval captain who was convalescing from a rather nasty operation. All seven nationalities sat down to a splendid meal, in the garden, rustled  up  from odds and ends but nevertheless very palatable.

Unfortunately, I had an accident with my laptop and managed to knock a cup of tea over the keyboard. As a result  for a while the whole thing would not work at all. In desperation Michael cooked it in the oven, at a fairly low temperature, and this seemed to a have salutary effect on most of the functions except that one corner of the keyboard still  refused to work and went into a noisy complaint whenever I pressed any of those particular keys. The biggest loss was my Dragon voice recognition. It kept telling me that what I was trying to access was incompatible or invalid, which of course is complete nonsense but nevertheless it meant that I would not be able to continue writing this blog whilst in Sweden, certainly not using that particular version