thomas m wilson

‘I hate a man who skins the land.’

Franklin D. Roosevelt said that, many years ago. This last week I was camping at Townshend State Park in southern Vermont and I noticed this lovely old stone retaining wall.

I asked the ranger about it, and he told me it had been built in the 1930s by members of the Civilian Conservation Corps, a government program for unemployed young men during the depression. I remembered learning in my high school history classes about this initiative of FDR, and the way in which the CCC had built many state park facilities, as well as planting lots of forests around the country. FDR was a great president, the greatest conservationist president ever. ‘I hate a man who skins the land.’ When he found out that he was the next president of the USA he had just been called down from a hike up a mountain in the Adirondacks. The mud from the mountain trail was still clinging to his boots when he was given the news. It was good to see this small but pleasing legacy of the Civilian Conservation Corps in Townshend State Park.

I grew more and more tired of seeing American flags draped off the front of people’s homes as we wound through the wooded valleys of Vermont. They’re everywhere to the extent that not flying one would look like an act of rebellion. But on a more positive note, I can report that the number and quality of state parks – places which have a camping ground and an area of protected land – in New England is very impressive. This system of protected areas and camping grounds must be the best in the world, or one of the best.

I loved the first night of the trip in Meadowland state park, near Lake Placid. The gentle floor of fallen pine needles, the deep green maze of maple and coniferous forest stretching out a few metres from the tent. The grey clouds floating slowly over the mountains and the valleys, valleys on the other sides of the mountains around us that you just knew were devoid of humanity, and only busy with the activities of other life forms. The tiny, striped chipmunks chattering and chirping and running up to our ankles. As I lay in my sleeping bag that night I thought of the tall, wooded Adirondacks leaning in above me, all around me, and I felt safe and contented.

Coming down out of the Adirondacks into the Champlain Valley and north-eastern Vermont was a clear transition between bioregions. From the tall hills (mountains, but without the craggy majestic peaks you might hitch to that word), down to the lake and then the horizon opens on the other side into open, very green and very pastoral space. The air was hot. Haze hung over the hills. We went to the south of Vermont where we were back in wooded valleys, but this time without the strongly coniferous and mountainous feeling of the Adirondacks – this was the Green Mountains. This place is very beautiful. There is seemingly endless woods, with a white, wooden boarded nineteenth century house here and there along the road. We swam in a river and the water flowed over the skin with a cool, refreshing feeling. The architecture is like the Etruscans of ancient Italy, it is lovely, but won’t last for hundreds of years like stone architecture – and that transience adds to its charm.

I read Wondering Home, Bill Mckibben’s book about walking through this area. He lives in Vermont and loves the place. As he walks he visits little organic farmers, sustainable forestry projects, and maple syrup farms, suggesting that this is one of the best places in the world where restrained and humane inhabitation on the land is concerned. I have to say I didn’t see that on my journey through the state, but then I was there only briefly and didn’t investigate deeply. It kind of makes sense though, considering that, along with northern California, Vermont was one of the key places where the American hippy back-to-the-land types of the 1960s and 1970s moved out from the cities to settle in. In Vermont you’re in a rural arcadia of sorts and it is hard to imagine that only three hours or so by car away is downtown New York.

That’s quite like what Thoreau would have seen as he walked down to the edge of Walden Pond.

It was going to take too long to get to Walden Pond, so here we were, camping among the trees five metres or so from the edge of a pond I imagine is just like Thoreau’s home. In fact this may be more in the spirit of ‘going to Walden’, than actually going to Concord woods, as here in the central eastern side of Vermont I’m in a much more remote valley than the ‘wilderness’ Henry sat himself down in in the 1850s. Sitting reading a book I looked up at one point one morning and suddenly felt how calmly beneficent the combination of plants and water and warmth is here. All of a sudden I really understood that passage in Walden where he writes of recovering from a bout of loneliness and about feeling that he was surrounded with life forms that provided relief amid the solitude. I think the reason Thoreau wrote that was partly the unmistakably benign nature of the plants and animals in this bioregion of north-east America in this summer season. A wooded, wild lake edge in New England in June has soft bird calls, or beautiful loons singing. It has little flowers and deep green grass. Birch, alder, maple, oak, beech. Green leaves that are broad, and most of all, rich in chlorophyll. The leaves are as green as green can be.

(The American beech, Fagus Grandiflolia, which is different to the European beech and very different to the southern beech of Australia and New Zealand, Nothofagus.)

No wonder Thoreau felt at home deeply and given good company by nature – he was in a place like this. You can learn to love more arid places on the earth – look at Edward Abbey’s love for the American desert in Desert Solitaire, or my own love of the south-west of Australia. But it is hard to find a more obviously benign environment for humans to live in as this Walden-esque, New England lake edge in June.

Maple leaves. I just had some of the sap from this kind of tree on my morning muesli, and it was delicious.

Around six weeks ago a Bowhead whale was caught off the coast of Alaska. Inside was found the remains of a lance bomb, an explosive harpoon head. Knowledge of this weapon shows that the whale had last been attacked around 1890. Using knowledge of the rate of decay of the lens inside the eye of the whale, as well as the age of the lance bomb, the whale was estimated to be around 120 years old. Some Bowhead whales are thought to live as long as two hundred years, so this whale could have lived decades longer. When I heard this bit of news yesterday my imagination was fired.

Tribute to a Long Lived Bowhead

Singing through deep, icy blue space, while the author of Moby Dick lay on his death-bed.

Engulfing a great cloud of krill, while Australia became a nation.

Crashing down out of the sky in sport, while the Depression washed over the Western nations.

Drifting slowly past an Artic ice pack, while jazz was invented.

Taking a leisurely draft of oxygen through the blowhole, while Britain introduced rationing.

Finding a baleen lover, while my grandparents had their first and only child together.

Growing old and wise, long before my own conception as a human being was credible.

Watching the Bowheads become strong again in numbers, after the IWC banned commercial whaling in 1982.

Diving deep into the blackness, while humanity decided to use the atmosphere as a sewer, and digital technology went online.

Finally, in 2007, facing a human with a harpoon again.

Facing blood and extinction a second time.

Death.

Know that even now, drifting in sequestered blue, the brothers and sisters of this fifty ton being are going to see more suns set than you.

Know that all the details you call modern, all the details of our ‘twentieth century’, are rounded by the life of one Bowhead whale.

I’ve read the news and I feel a fresh breeze in my room.

I’ve now left Montreal, and I feel a bit sad about it. So, in retrospect, I’m going to go on a little bike ride, camera in hand, through the city.

First some info. It is the second biggest French speaking city in the world after Paris – 3.6 million people. But the city is bilingual – you can speak French of course, but when you get tired or are unable to express a fine philosophical point, you could lapse into English and be understood pretty well. How nice for an English speaker like myself! The city is far inland, but has a big, wide river running past it – the St. Lawrence river – and has a large, wooded hill in its centre – Mt. Royal. I’d miss the ocean if I lived here. But then you do have the arcadia of the Adirondacks/the Champlain valley just south of here into the US, an hour and a half hours in a car away.

When you go up Mt. Royal and look down you can see downtown…

But if you go north-east from downtown the Plateau and Mile End the area becomes more residential, but in a cafe frequented, community fostering, urban kind of way. Old three up brick apartment buildings line the streets.

Here I begin my ride at the bottom of the stairs from the apartment I was staying in…

The trees in this area are one of the things I like about it…

Going down St. Viateur, past bagel bakeries and organic supermarket, people are all over the place, in cafes and on the pavement. The density of living spaces means more people about, and fewer cars in action. Even without the environmental virtues of this scenario, this kind of urban environment – lightened by the street trees – appeals to me over the semi-isolation of living in the well-spaced Australian suburbs. Even more, you don’t feel cramped here on the wide streets of this new world city as you might in the similarly busy streets many old European capitals.

When you have a bike in a new city somehow you feel less of a tourist, and more a part of the place – even if you’re riding a vintage road bike like this creaking contraption.

The Montreal Jazz Festival brings out everybody, young and old.

Saskatoon berries, a native food formerly eaten by the American Indians. One night I and a couple of friends picked them off somebody’s front garden tree and brought them back to the apartment for desert. Food is generally very cheap in Montreal, a meal out often costing say eleven dollars (Canadian and Australian dollars are about the same). Rent is also cheap – you could live in this area and share an apartment with one or two other people and pay $100 a week, or a little more.

So I really like Montreal. I’m just not sure about the winters. I’m not sure I could handle being inside for so many months of the year… But as a new worlder from one of the non-superpower nations I relate well to the unspoken sense here that we are not the centre of the world, and we are not stuck in our cultural ways. One of the differences I like compared to Australia is that the culture here is probably more open to the arts and ideas in some ways than the still slightly anti-intellectual legacy evident in Oz (I may be wrong on this point – let me know if you disagree).

I hope I’m back in this part of the world soon!

Well I’m in England. Oxford is a little over an hour on the bus from Heathrow, and as I rolled along the highway the land I saw on either side seemed so domesticated after the woods of New York and New England. I felt a sense of dissatisfaction with the natural world here, as though the density of people in southern England had robbed it of its glory.

But I’m in Oxford, and there are other things to appreciate apart from nature. Here is what you’ll see when you look through the main gate of many of the ancient Oxford colleges: the ‘quad’. The noise of the high street dims and the calm of the scholar’s sanctuary takes over.

This afternoon I had an interesting meeting. I was wondering around Oxford by myself. Walking past New College I poked my head through the main gate, and noticed a ‘no visitors’ sign. Ignoring this with casual trepidation, I walked onwards into the college grounds. Rounding a building I came on a lawn, with some pretty flower beds on one side. A few students were hanging out on the lawn and one of them asked me if I was a photographer. We got to talking and they offered me a glass of sparkling wine.

Tim, on the left, and John, on the right, are English, while Daniel, in the centre is American. We had a jovial argument about the advantages of American and Australian accentless meritocracy over the system of inherited prestige in some parts of Britain, along with plenty of other stuff, and they invited me over to Keeble College later that evening to continue the talking and drinking (Oxford University is a collection of colleges where students live and study).

Here is John in his common room, playing the gentleman at ease.

We went up on the roof of one of the buildings to hang out, and the Victorian brickwork of Keeble glowed quietly beneath us.

There will be more about arriving in England tomorrow.

Post-script…

Ok, I’ll admit that the evening was a bit more eventful than that. There were a bunch of us at Keeble that night getting a bit drunk. About three in the morning or so somebody had the idea of running around the main quod of Keeble college stark naked. Everybody did it. Yep, everybody.

Oxford is a city of 136 thousand people, about 60 miles from London. This place is an old don in a modern scene. Today I stood in the middle of the High, and looked towards Queens College. What would I have see if I had stood here in the 1920s, I wondered?

Well, let’s see…

Wow, all of a sudden I’m not swirling in a turbulent sea of 14 year old French and Spanish school kids, and there are dapper gents in well creased slacks enjoying the spaciousness of their street corner!

In the last thousand years only two new roads have been built in Oxford. The High Street of Oxford was not designed for enormous metal vehicles. I am an advocate for the environmental benefits of public transport, but if you stand in the middle of this road – Oxford’s High Street – today you’ll have such things obscure your view and brush past your coat tails. Streets in Canada, the US and Australia and the rest of the New World, were built more recently. Medieval road design does not figure in our daily experience, and there is a lot more space on our pavements as a result.

So here is what you’ll see today standing in the middle of the road:

Now let’s go up the road a bit, past that spire you can see in the picture above, to Queen St. And let’s wind back the clock to 1907. What shall we see?

What do I see today?

Hmm… Blank concrete, nylon sportsware and multinational temples of commerce. Get me out of here!

Let’s go over to Broad Street to get away from all the people. And let’s go back even further in history this time, to 1875.

Sure there would have been plenty more carts here on market day, but for now peace reigns.

Ok, back to the future.

Britain, and the world as a whole, has changed a lot in the last hundred years. One of those changes has been an increase in noise and ugliness on the High streets of the Commonwealth.

In response I suggest we all recite the Chap Manifesto. Could classic style be an act of revolution on the streets of 2007?

Today I saw this gargolye at New College, Oxford. Its veiled features got me thinking about the way in which universities are not always awake and alert to the reality of an era of environmental crisis.

During the Second World War our governments put much of the professorial brain power within the universities to work on research that was relevant to the war effort. This redirection in the core mission of the university was temporary, and after the war things returned to normal. In 2007 we are faced with a window of ten or so years within which to restrain our carbon economy, or face the deaths of hundreds of millions of people and the permanent extinction of around half the species of life on planet earth. I would suggest that such a situation would be well termed a crisis. I would suggest that such a situation asks for, among other things, the channeling of the intellectual efforts of our university research sector into dealing with this threat. It is true that research into ‘sustainability’ issues is a major research priority in many countries, particularly Britain thanks to the Labour government. However, has the academic world as a whole truly woken up to the magnitude of the climate crisis? Are universities being put on a ‘war-time’ footing? No. Look upwards. The man on the tower still hides his eyes behind his hands.

Do universities communicate with the public? Do they try to pass the fruits of their research into the public sphere?

The gold of these gates shines in the sun. The gates are firmly closed. Oxford’s wealthy coffers and tenured scholars are back there somewhere.

The gardens of New College are full of flowers at the moment. I do think that universities should centred around beautiful green spaces, as many of them are. Being in such environments is relaxing, and a state of biophilia-induced calm is a good base from which to engage in clear, concentrated mental activity. Mathew Arnold’s ‘Scholar Gypsy’, an Oxford man I believe, is an appropriate pastoral for the practicing prof to emulate.

But how far away from the real world, how deeply inside the academic sanctuary, can academics afford to rest?

I don’t have time to write now, so just a few words.

My friend Danny’s Bethnelgreen Rd. apartment. Outside London is raining, despite it being summer time. London really doesn’t excite me. Grey skies, expensive public transport, bored faces and slumped shoulders in the hot and over-crowded tube, Indians selling tacky merchandise on the pavement of Bethnelgreen Rd., uninspiring and shoddy architectural styles lining the streets… I’m glad I don’t pay the $250 Australian a week for a room in an apartment here. London is not on the list of charismatic places I’ve been on this trip around the world. Why do Australians flock here?

Now the good things about this city I’ve seen. This is the front door of Maggs Rare Books, a very fine bookshop. I love good front doors.

This is my friend Danny browsing in a photography bookshop in Bloomsbury.

And here are some of the old books at Maggs. Time travellers, full of learning.

Right now I’m off to Lyme Regis in the south-west.

John Fowles died 5 November 2005, a bit over a year and a half ago.  John had lived here, at Belmont House in the small coastal town of Lyme Regis on the south-west coast of England, for around four decades.  He would have seen the light on those cliffs in the distance on many evenings as he sat in his upstairs study and wrote.

Last Wednesday afternoon I arrived in Lyme, the first time I’d been there since John’s death.  I was visiting Sarah Fowles.  As we walked down the hill to look at the recently built ‘John Fowles Path’, a memorial to John’s life here, the high and fading sound of English sea gulls and the gentle wash of the sea below came freshly to my ears.

I have spent a lot of time over the last few years studying John’s writings, and reading his personal journals.  Many of John’s ideas about nature and his attitudes towards the natural world have had a considerable influence on me.  Seeing Sarah again and returning to John’s home was an important experience.

John studied French at New College, Oxford, during the late 1940s.  Charles Drazin, editor of John’s journals, wrote an obituary in the New College journal, seen above, for the man.  Yes, that also happens to be the Oxford college I ended up in last weekend.  A friend of mine is taking up a job teaching French at this same college next year.  The lightning bolt of hazard strikes twice in a row.

This is the front of Belmont House in Lyme Regis.  It has been given to the Landmark Trust and it was strange to see the pink dolphins frozen in stone and the light pink facade, and know that John and Sarah no longer reside within.

I walked around the back of the house the next morning.  The three acre garden is still there, with the area of lawn at the top.  And then I saw what you see above:  yellow flowers growing over the stone sculpture of Ceres, the Roman goddess of growing plants.  The profusion of yellow blooms touched me, it was as though life continued over the still figure of John’s stone goddess in a vidication of his faith in nature.  The man is gone, but the beauty of nature, embodied by the plants that John loved, return anew this year, immortal in the present.

On Thursday I walked in the Undercliff, the area of wilderness and unstable geology which stretches six or so miles westwards from Lyme.

As I walked I remembered walking here for the first time in 2002, soon after I had walked over the ridges and beaches of Reunion Island.  Walking through the English wood I remembered feeling that John’s love of nature was my love of nature, and that that love and that relationship would be, as it had been for him, a deep lifeline.

On Thursday afternoon I was on board a train, heading for the small English town of Totnes, south of Exeter, in Devon.  Ah train travel… if only I could ride more trains.  I think it is the best form of long distance transport.  Space, quiet, the English countryside domed by a blue sky full of fluffy white clouds outside the window, and the feeling that you are happily en route.

Totnes is a small town of eight thousand people, and is reputedly the classic English hippy country town.  Like many old country towns in Britain, the streets are just wide enough for a horse and cart, and in 2007 when they are full of cars, you feel a bit hemmed in.  Totnes is trying to powerdown, to ween itself of oil.  But bikes are dangerous on the very narrow country lanes that wind between the hedges – I and my friend Cliona hitched a ride back to her place outside the town, and as we rode along I saw a cyclist almost fall into the hedge, trying to ride so close to the edge of the road to avoid our car coming up from behind .

The Totnes Pound: a good idea.  You can buy one of these things for 95 pence, and use it to buy stuff in many of the shops in Totnes.  The great thing about local currencies like this one is that the money of the people of Totnes will stay in Totnes, instead of heading off to London or Paris or Sydney or wherever.  If the money stays in Totnes then the local community benefits.  There are over a couple of thousand local currencies now in existence around the world.  I hope there are more and more.

I spied a London mood…

Europe is the most densely populated continent. Only 1/100 of Britain has its original forest cover. London air pollution can be seen on the black grime on the buildings of the capital. These are the stones of the Fitzroy Hotel.  Imagine what your lungs would look like after fifty years of living in this city.

Martin Amis was right in London Fields to portray this city as a grey and gritty. But enough criticism. I’m staying on Bethnel Green Road with my friend Danny and this part of East London is pretty close to being on the Indian subcontinent. It is a mark of the multiculturalism of this city that I thought I was engaged in very London experiences when I relaxed in the apartment yesterday listening to a Ravi Shankar record, and when I then strolled down the street past the West Indian guys listening to reggae circa 1974 on my headphones.

They have damn good hats in this town. I bought a straw hat with a green top in Brick Lane market today from a stylish black guy.  You can see some of Alva’s other hat work on his site. Below is Brick Lane market. The fashion here is far more quirky than any  other European cities can manage.

They also have great bookshops in this city. Foyles on Charing Cross Rd., the road most famous for its bookshops, is excellent. As is the London Review Bookshop in Bloomsbury (that is the British Museum you see in the background on the left).

Browsing in these bookshops on the weekend I discovered a few titles I plan to get hold of and leaf through. They are:

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman; The Earth Only Endures by Jules Pretty; and the apparently quite gimacky but actually very intriguing Extreme Nature by Mark Carwardine.

One book I did buy was Wildwood by Roger Deakin.  The author of Waterlogged, a book about one man’s attempt to swim his way across Britain, died last year.  This book details his travels through trees around the world.  I happen to think the jacket design is superb.

I said that the British Museum was in the background of a previous photo. Walking around the Japan section of the place I discovered an ancient bell. Apparently bells such as this one have been found buried on the edge of agricultural land, suggesting that they were involved with some kind of fertility ritual. In Zen Buddhism the bell is used as symbol of enlightenment, a moment of clarity or satori. If you can, get your hands on an album simply called ‘Japanese Temple Bells. It is a recording of different bells, many from the 7th century, and is well worth hearing.

Tomorrow I’m leaving London for Geneva. This weekend I’ll either be in the Alps of Switzerland or the Black Forest of Germany.

I arrived in this country last Wednesday evening.  The approach from England and from the west emphasised the space and rolling patchwork of forests around here.  26% of this country is forested, a big contrast after England, and it really showed as I looked down out of my plane window.  People and their settlements were being almost shrugged off by the massive geology, the ridges and the hills, and large areas of trees stood all around.  Ah, what a relief.

As soon as I arrived at the airport I could see that this was a rich country.  One thinks that once one is in the first world that is it, first world means first world.  But no, think again.  This place is even richer than England.  The public transport is excellent.  The dirt of Bethnel Green Road seems a distant memory.  The country has very little crime and almost zero unemployment.  They have hydro and nuclear energy which means their electricity produces no CO2 pollution, and recycling is very, very advanced here.   They also have direct democracy, and referenda are held a few times each year on different topics.   Good place eh?  On Thursday I was swimming with my friend Ben in Lake Geneva in warm water, with the French-looking hotel fronts of the six story stone buildings that surround the lake edge in the background.  I thought it was a pretty nice place.

But what of the opaque banking system here?  In this country a corrupt, third world dictator or mafioso crime boss from eastern Europe, can have an account with a number on.   Some of the wealth in this very wealthy place comes from rich banks who operate in shonky ways.  And did I mention the price of a sandwhich?!  Think $10 Australian.  I honestly don’t know how tourists manage to come here without leaving all their savings in the hands of the Swiss.Today I walked in the centre of the country, in Grindelwald.  Walking up the Alps I heard a strange disembodied tinkling sound, as though metallic wind chimes were ringing out there in the grey space before me. What could it be I thought? On the other side of the steep ravine was another slope, and so it wasn’t coming from mid air at two thousand metres, this much I knew. From the preternatural to the prosaic, in a few steps, bovine reality loomed out of the mist.

The mist wraps the mountains like swaddling. The cauldron is a space of obscurity…

The Eiger, a well known mountain, has a glacier on one of its sides.

Last night I dreamt of a valley whose sides only could be seen. In the morning I saw one such outline.

As beautiful as the Alps can be, I do realise now why Australians flock to London, despite its flawed nature. It is the shared cultural background of the place for English speakers of the Commonwealth. We are able to speak a common language, allowing utter transparency of communication. And we know much of English literature, with its consequent common points of reference. Going through German speaking Switzerland I sometimes remembered walking through London with my friend Danny…

Despite Switzerland being a good society, I don’t want to live here. But what of Geneva, a city where 45% of people are from elsewhere and where English is heard on the streets often? More in my next blog entry.

This is the view I see looking out of my friend Ben’s apartment window. That area of buildings in the back is Old Geneva. The other day I was sitting in the park around the corner and I kept hearing people speaking different languages, often English. This city may only have the population as Hobart, Tasmania (around 200 thousand), but it is much more cosmopolitan, and feels much larger because of the more densely spaced living quarters.

Today I walked, through extensive security checks, into the Palais des Nations, a central building of the United Nations here in Geneva. The big HQ of the UN is in New York City, but the second largest centre for the UN is here in Geneva.

The 192 states which have membership in the UN each get a vote in the General Assembly, the most important forum in the UN (this bit is actually in New York). But it doesn’t sound very democratic to me. I was in Samoa a while ago and there are only about 200 thousand of them. Why should they get the same vote as China with over a billion people? As our tour guide continued to talk about the comprehensive membership coverage in the UN I found myself wondering if Tibet or West Papua are two of the 192 nations that get a voice in this international talk shop. Get real Tom: of course they don’t.

The view from the softly padded diplomat’s chair… I have to admit that the idea of day long sittings in such places, arguing fine points of language in shared declarations, would send this citoyen running screaming into Lac Leman. But they do good stuff. To use an example you might not expect, a committee of the UNESCO World Heritage program is currently looking into the evils of logging practices on the edge of a world heritage area in south-west Tasmania. I hope they shame Australia on the international stage on that point.

In a week or so I’ll be in France, and not too long after that, back in Western Australia.

A snow white swan cruises the fast flowing river that courses through the centre of Geneva. I’m used to seeing black swans in Australia, so the snowy feathers are a novelty for this rambling tourist at least.

Walking home you cross the river and look down at veins and eddies of silver and black. You are reminded in a salutory manner that this river has run through here for much longer than this quite old city has stood.

The sleeping sword in the hand of a forefather of the city…

One thing I didn’t mention in my previous remarks on Switzerland is that they are gun mad. Well not quite, but let us just say that every adult male has a machine gun locked in a box in his cellar. They don’t have a professional army, and the Swiss are all prepared for immediate mobilization in case of an invasion. The problem is guys, nobody is coming. Italy is in a cafe drinking a latte! France has a croissant to deal with!

(Need I add that easy access to fire arms is bad news when it comes to the issue of suicide.)

In summer in Geneva you can get a bike for four hours for free. I left my $20 deposit and rolled out along the lake. Why doesn’t every city have this kind of scheme?

By the way, that is the famous ‘jet d’eau’ of Geneva in the background of the previous photo, the tallest fountain in the world at 140 metres.

The sight of a summer evening in mid-flow. May there be many more for all of us.

Tomorrow morning I’m off to Paris, then Tuesday I’m going to Stockholm.