A Swedish mystery

As I'm such a fan of all things Swedish, I like to read The Local, an online newspaper that tells you Sweden's news in English (they've also just launched Norwegian and French versions). Last week they carried a story which particularly appealed to me.

Joe and Angela Avery have been coming to a cabin near Nässjö in south central Sweden every autumn for the last decade to visit Angela's cousins, the offspring of her English aunt who married a Swede. [I'm precis-ing from the article.]

     Over the years, visits to flea markets, sales, and auctions have become a standard part of the Avery's annual pilgrimages to Sweden [jealous much? Moi?].
      In August they attended an auction in Eksjö and bought a box of "knicknacks” which included a vintage camera. It was only upon examining the camera at home in England that Joe discovered it still contained a roll of film. “Luckily, I didn't open it until I had wound the film back in the camera,” he said. “Curiosity then led me to wonder if there might be any images on the film.”
      Joe found a photo lab that could develop the outdated film, even though he was doubtful that any images could be salvaged. A few days later, Joe heard that his pictures were ready to collect. "I couldn't believe it,” said Joe.
      The film had produced twelve grainy black and white images, some of which are shown in this post.
According to the photo lab, the film in the camera was manufactured between 1947 and 1952, so the images could very well be more than fifty years old.
     Joe and Angela are hoping that making the images public may elicit more clues about the pictures. They  hope members of the family depicted in the images will get in touch so they have a chance to reclaim a slice of their past.   Here's the link to the full set of 12 images:

 

Joe Avery's mystery Swedish photos »

Comments on the Local's reader forum have already offered tantalising clues as to the identity of the family, or at least to their location. Most seem to agree that they lived in southern Småland. As I'm enjoying trying to identify people in my own family's old photos at the moment, I hope that the family in these old photos will get hold of the story and identify either themselves or their forebears.
     The other day I came across someone else's family history research online and it intersected with my family -- the researcher and I have a great-great-grandfather in common (or rather, his great-great-grandfather was my great-grandmother's stepfather -- I think). The extra information I gleaned enabled me to find a photograph of the Manchester back street where my great-grandmother lived as a child (now demolished). Just to set eyes on that photo gave me a marvellous feeling, even though the street was extremely ordinary and humble.

Pickford Street, Manchester (in 1964)

Read for RNIB Day

Just a quick post about a fundraising event I feel strongly about. Here's the press release:

"1 In 3 Adults Admit To Hiding Secret Reading Passion, According To Leading Sight Loss Charity

Posted at 10:18AM Wednesday 12 Oct 2011

Almost a third (31 per cent) of UK adults are too embarrassed to admit to loving a particular book, according a new poll from the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB). In contrast, blind and partially sighted readers face a dramatically limited choice of titles - just 7 per cent of all books are available in fully accessible formats.
Released on the eve of the charity's annual fundraising appeal Read for RNIB Day, the survey reveals that more than one in three (36 per cent) of UK adults have a guilty pleasure author that they love to read in private but would not necessarily admit to reading in public. Books topping the list of guilty pleasure reads for those that admit to them are JK Rowling's Harry Potter (31 per cent) series, with The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (28 per cent) following second, and Bridget Jones' Diary by Helen Fielding (19 per cent) third.

In stark contrast to this, new research released today by RNIB shows that just 7 per cent of books are available in formats accessible to blind and partially sighted people - braille, large print and audio books.* As it is predicted that by 2050 the number of people with sight loss in the UK will double to nearly four million, the charity's work is becoming increasingly important and in demand.

Sue Scott, who lost her sight seven years ago, said: "One day I realised that not only could I not see anymore, I couldn't read either. You don't realise it, but reading is everything and when you lose your sight you realise how important it is. From reading the newspaper or an email from a friend, to reading a private letter from the doctor or a bill you don't want others to know about. You become totally reliant on others and you lose your privacy and independence. Read for RNIB Day is a great idea and will help raise money for reading services for blind and partially sighted people, like me. It doesn't matter what the activity or challenge is, as long as its reading related and you're having fun and helping to raise money. I hope that lots of people get involved."

Mayor of London Boris Johnson admitted to his guilty literary pleasure: "When I have a spare moment to read a book, I regularly return to Ludwig Wittgenstein's great philosophical work of the 20th Century, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus."

Julian Fellowes, Oscar-winning script writer, author and Chairman of RNIB Talking Book Appeal, says: "Reading is a tremendously important part of my life and I firmly believe that it's one of the pleasures that can be enjoyed one hundred per cent by blind people, thanks to Talking Books. Please join Read for RNIB Day and read something amazing in October to help RNIB raise much-needed funds which will help even more blind and partially sighted people gain better access to reading services and equipment."

Read for RNIB Day is on 14 October and RNIB is asking everyone to get involved and do something reading-related to raise money and support its work for blind and partially sighted people. Call 0845 345 0054, visit www.rnib.org.uk or text read to 70007 to donate £3."

I love reading so much. It's my passion. Well, in fact it's so much a part of my life that I wouldn't even call it a passion any more. I just do it whenever I can. Last night I was reading Christos Tsiolkas' The Slap from 4am to 5.15am because I couldn't sleep. When I read that only 7% of books are available to blind and partially sighted people, I tried to imagine how I'd feel if my reading freedom was restricted to that extent. It would be terrible.

In fact my eyesight has deteriorated quite dramatically over the last couple of years and now I can't read without my glasses. This change in one of my main connections to the world has really disoriented me and  made me feel quite depressed, even though I am lucky enough to have glasses that make it all okay again. It's not the same as my lovely crisp eyesight of yore. My dad is nearly blind from glaucoma and this year I have also had 'vitreous detachment' which was quite alarming (though not really that serious, just another ageing thing -- but the slow flashes of light deep inside my eyes for a few weeks were rather disturbing). So I love my eyes and I love the things I can see with them and I have supported RNIB Day.

www.rnib.org.uk

 Oh, my guilty reading pleasures are: Ruth Rendell, Elmore Leonard and old children's books. What are yours?

Brooklyn Sketchbook Project finished

At last I've completed my sketchbook for the Brooklyn Sketchbook Project.
     It's on the theme of 'I Remember You' and is a sort of biography of my mother. She is lost to me now in the final stages of Alzheimer's and her personality has been stripped away by that horrible disease, but she was a very singular person with many wonderful talents and also many character traits which coloured my own childhood (and of course my whole relationship with her) and which, in turn, had been formed by her own relationship with her parents.
     Well, it's a very affectionate tribute to her but perhaps not as sugary as some people might expect. I don't really do sugary. Also, you can't really do justice to all the subtleties of a person's life in 32 small pages. I enjoyed doing it immensely and am pleased that I forced myself to step outside my comfort zone by sometimes making myself do drawing where it would have been easier to go for collage or photos.

Glee full

Thank goodness Glee has started again. I watch it with my kids and I absolutely adore it, especially the big numbers and anything that tugs at the heart. I'm a complete sucker for having my tears jerked and it doesn't take much to make me well up.

Last year's John Lewis ad (the new one for their TV department is fantastic too, but not such a tearjerker)...

Tulisa crying about her mum on X Factor last week...

The end of Dances With Wolves where Kev goes off into the snow with his Sioux wife (and was there a child too?). So corny, I know, but it had me in pieces. I told my kids that I'd cried all the way home after I saw that movie (it was really weird, I couldn't stop) and now they tease me mercilessly about it.

I'm unfortunately also known, now, at my daughter's school as the only mother who cried at the gymnastics display. I just found it terribly moving: the youthful endeavour, everyone working together, the joy of it all. Oh don't get me started again.
     I cried when I saw the coach drawing out of the school playground with the kids going on their week away at the field centre -- and it wasn't even either of my kids. I also cried when I was waiting for the train to London once and a special nostalgia train pulled in -- a steam train with everyone on board dressed up in Forties and Fifties outfits, going to Scarborough for the day. When it pulled away from the station it was like seeing a ghost train from the past and, oh dear, just the memory of it even now...

This week I also watched the Blur documentary, No Distance Left To Run which was very moving. Just to see how time and stresses had etched their mark on the band's faces. Damon and Alex were my idea of perfection when they were younger. Now they're still great but that fresh-faced look has inevitably gone. They talked so honestly about how their success made them crack up, and then, at the end, when they were on stage at Glastonbury and Damon wept ... well, you can imagine.
     When my kids tease me and come and leer at me to see if they can spot a tear glistening in the corner of my eye, I think, well at least I'm not completely hardhearted.
     (Most embarrassing welling-up: Nanci Griffith's 'Trouble in the Fields'. I know. But it gets me every time: 'You be the mule, I'll be the plough, come harvest time we'll work it out'.... oh, excuse me, I have to ...go and ... blow my nose...)

Clowns, and scary clowns

I'm amazed to have received another present through the post. Lesley, another Postman's Knock friend, sent me this wonderful Seventies Ladybird book on clowns. It's a great book that I've not come across before and I'm very touched by Lesley's kind thought -- thank you.

Well, I took my new book to work and showed it to my friend that I work with. I know she suffers from 'coulrophobia' or fear of clowns. I'm afraid I find this quite amusing -- as long as there isn't a real scary clown coming through the door of our office (like Mr Jelly, the Psychoville clown, above), I think she can cope. She looked through the book and announced it to be 'wrongy wrong wrong'. Whereupon, I looked up 'fear of clowns' online and found a wealth of weirdness.

Children were consulted about the redecorating of a children's hospital in Sheffield -- clowns were the theme, but the kids rejected them out of hand and psychologists, following up with research, announced that children are frightened by clowns because they are similar to normal people but at the same time disturbingly different. This brought me to the concept of the 'uncanny valley', which conjured up wonderful images of a creepy location, a listless stream overshadowed by grotesque rock formations or some such, but in fact refers to a phenomenon in robotics: when human replicas look and act almost, but not perfectly, like actual human beings, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The 'valley' is a marked dip in a graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot's human likeness. A strange concept, but you can see how it applies to clowns.

On eBay I found this nasty-looking fellow for sale -- for £144! I'd love him, but that price is out of my league.

I do find clowns disturbing but it's that that makes me like them and want to gather images of them around me. The creepy combination of merriment and hostility is a winner every time.
     Just to bring things back within the realms of sanity, I also found these ... lovely cushions:

One of a series of eight from here. There, nothing scary about that, is there?

Sweden comes in the post

Sweden in Colour from 1956

Having an increasingly rubbish memory is quite nice in one respect: I forget what I've ordered on Amazon and so on, so that when a package arrives it's usually a nice surprise. That's why when a parcel arrived for me at the end of last week, I was only slightly bemused. Usually I remember at the first peek inside the jiffy, 'Oh yes, I did order How To Boil Cheese' or whatever, but in this case I got right down to the bubble wrap before I realised that this wasn't a treat of my own conjuring.

Strange photo (mine) of lovely book pages, looks as though I took it in front of a roaring fire.

No, wonderfully, it was a present from Chrissie, of the Postman's Knock postcard project, of two lovely old picture books about Sweden. They're both from the Fifties and are incredibly evocative. One of them is dedicated to Mr Robinson 'from Swedish boot and shoe operatives' and they have signed their names below the dedication, along with their Swedish home towns. They must have been on a trade visit to Britain back in 1956.
     I'm just so touched by Chrissie's kindness. She sent a great letter with the books about her time as a nanny/au pair in Stockholm just after she left school. I won't forget the image she painted of herself in her floor-length red PVC raincoat and black boots -- fantastic. Like me, she loved the city and soaked up as much of it as she could, leaving her with a lifelong affection for the place. I think we both feel very drawn to Sweden and it has 'clicked' with us in a way that other places, although fantastic, just don't necessarily. When I left school I spent a year in Paris as an au pair and, like Chrissie, explored every corner of the city. I was going to study French at University on my return, so the whole experience stood me in very good stead, but I don't have the passion for Paris and France that I now have for Stockholm and Sweden. Similarly, I've been to New York twice (years ago, for work), but didn't catch the NYC bug (except in vintage postcard form).

I've been feeding my Sweden bug by reading the four-part Emigrants saga by Vilhelm Moberg, about Swedish farming folk who emigrate to America in 1850 -- it's absolutely brilliant and compelling. I've got the third one to start now, not in the smart edition shown above, but in a great kitsch cover from the Seventies:

And, this week, still more Sweden came through the letterbox as I had managed to track down the film version of books 1 and 2, which was made in Swedish in 1971 (starring Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann) and then re-edited and dubbed into English for the American market. It is only available on VHS and is really rare. When I unpacked the video, I discovered it was infested with bugs and larvae! I didn't stop to see if they were alive or dead but ran to the loo to brush them off and flush them away. I've also bought the sequel, The New Land, from the same seller, so I will be full of trepidation when that one arrives. I imagine these videos have been stored in a garage for forty years or something, hence the miniature hitchhikers.

still from The Emigrants

I haven't watched the film through yet, but couldn't resist watching the first few minutes, partly just to see if it played. It plays! It's so beautiful, like being transported back to old Sweden in the same way I was by Skansen.

another still of stony Småland

Guardian Book Swap

I realise that they've pretty much lifted the idea from Book Crossing, but I'm taken with the Guardian's Book Swap. If you haven't seen it, they gave away a sticker in yesterday's paper (and another one in today's Observer) and you can stick it inside a book which you then leave in some corner or other for someone else to find and enjoy.

On the whole, I don't like to part with my books as I love them so much. I could probably do with giving some of them away as they are now two rows deep in my biggest bookshelf and it's virtually impossible to find any of the ones at the back, apart from the fact that they were once vaguely in alphabetical order and in blocks by genre. Now I'm also filling in the spaces above the rows, which looks hideous. But there is no more room for another book case anywhere in our house.

Luckily, I have another stash of books that I don't feel so tied to, which are books I've reviewed, so I'll be stickering some of these up and leaving them in suitable places. This could pose a challenge as my entire life more or less consists of getting up, driving to work, putting in some semblance of the required hours and driving home again. I don't think anyone will find the books if I leave them on the back seat of the car. And as my office is inside a library, it could be kind of confusing for people if I left them there. It may have to wait until I go on a train or, god forbid, walk somewhere. Or maybe loos are good places?
     If you want to download the sticker, it's here. I will feel happy if I can give away some books and they find new owners who enjoy them and want to keep them.