Time to fast away the old year passes and hail the new, lads and lasses.



But before moving on to 2002, there's a lot of frantic preparation in store for tonight's feast. Lamb and chicken tagines to top off with honey and orange blossom water, coriander potato cakes to fry, merguëz sausages to wrap in pastry and bake, couscous salad with melon, black beans, rucola and chevre to prepare, chocolate truffles to roll. We're off to A.'s apartment to help get everything ready. Happy Moroccan New Year.



The Swedish phrase for the day is god fortsättning. It means happy new year, more or less.



- by Francis S.

A conspiracy is afoot and I smell a rat. I mean, a cat. Two of them to be precise, brought over by A. the ex-model and her boyfriend the photographer who came to dinner last night.



You see, the husband has been hot to get a cat for well on a year now. Me, my parents were raised on farms where animals belonged outside. We had a dog once when I was a little boy, but I think my parents have passed on to me their general indifference when it comes to pets.



Not that I'm immune to the charms of a cat. When I lived in Barcelona, my flatmate had a scrawny little cat, Pepa, who seemed to think I was her knight in less-than-shining armor, come to save her from the dreariness of her life in a cold Spanish apartment with an undeniably crazy owner (well, crazy but lovable). From the first day I arrived, Pepa slept most of the night with me, getting up early in the morning to go sleep with her owner, E., but then returning after an hour or so. And when she slept, she had to be touching me, even if it was just the very tip of her paw.



As for the current conspiracy, I think the husband connived with A. in order to show me how awfully nice it would be to have cats running around our own apartment, curiouser and curiouser as they padded and sniffed their way through everything, or curling up next to us on the sofa as we drank red wine and smoked cigarettes and yammered on about the Moroccan food planned for the new year's party at A. and her boyfriend's apartment. (They went home at 1: 00 or so, cats and all.)



In fact, the idea of having cats at home did rather grow on me, although I'm not a big one for changing litter or vacuuming cat hair, and I definitely am not very tolerant when it comes to nasty little kitty claws ripping apart dining room chairs.



Still, I suppose I should be happy that a cat or two didn't appear under the Christmas tree this year.



The Swedish word for the day is lurad. It means tricked.



- by Francis S.

I moved to Sweden three years ago this very day.



The time has raced by at rocket speed.



At I.'s dinner party last night, the English mathematician living in Germany - he's lived there for 14 years - said to me, "you don't miss home yet, do you."



He was right, I haven't every really missed the States. And I'd always figured that if I don't miss it by now, I'll never miss it.



But maybe I've been wrong.



"I wonder if part of my being happy has to do with not knowing the language, that when I really start to use Swedish relatively exclusively, I'll lose part of myself," I said to him.



"Oh, no," he replied. "It makes you hold on to the language even more."



Which didn't really answer the question I was asking, which was not about losing the language but about losing myself. But the subject changed when someone asked another question, and I never ended up probing deeper into it.



- by Francis S., faux philosopher

Last night we had dinner at the apartment of I., the sister of A.'s boyfriend, the photographer (how's that for a tortured line of possessives? Can you figure out who is related to who?).



I. has a new boyfriend, an Englishman living in Germany who works for a big German publishing company. He seemed curiously young - I suspect though he's 50 or so, he's never been married - and charmingly broke numerous Swedish rules of etiquette: not standing properly in line to get his food at the buffet table, not paying attention to the various toasts, talking over people and talking too much, not formally saying goodbye to everyone as they left in a slow trickle.



He is a mathemetician and believes that at some point it will be possible to reduce our selves to some kind of code or equation that could be looked at or stopped at any given millisecond, and that this code or equation is uniquely us and exists forever and is our soul.



I understood, I think, his reduction of our selves, but I wonder.



"Do you believe that our souls are something more than this?" I asked.



Being a mathemetician, he seemed to believe that such a code is wonder enough to fit his definition of a soul, because it is unique and because it exists forever.



I find it unsatisfying to be at heart an equation and very humanly wish my soul to be something much more.



The Swedish word for the day is Gud. It means God.



- by Francis S.

Any Stockholmer worth her or his salt loves Sweden best in summertime, when the sun never quite sets, when ferry rides through the rocky but green islands of the Stockholm archipelago are lit with gold.



Me, I love it best now, when the sky is dim and grey, and all the old yellow buildings of Stockholm are frosted with a layer of snow that just keeps getting thicker and thicker, and lights twinkle and bank and flame behind windows under the snow, candles and Christmas stars and kitchen lights.



It is the romantic perfect winter of my imagination, and it is glorious when the train stops mid-ride over the icy black water between Gamla Stan and Södermalm, and on one side are the old buildings of Kornhamnstorg, a huge Christmas tree with plain white lights in the middle of the square, and on the other side are the bluffs of Södermalm, capped with twinkling towers and church steeples and cupolas.



- by Francis S.

The two-sentence review of "Fellowship of the Ring":



Don't you just hate it when despite having great material to work with, i.e. actors and fabulous natural (if a bit too computer-enhanced) scenery, a director is still reduced to telling you what to feel by laying on the music thick and heavy, and worse, music by enya - enya for chrissakes!!!!! Although to be fair, maybe it has something to do with trying to take a sprawling and unwieldy book and forcing it into the shape of a movie - to paraphrase one of Ian Holm's lines in the movie, ''it feels like too little butter spread over too much bread.''



I know I sound like some kind of heretic criticizing the film, but I didn't like it much.



The Swedish word for the day is besviken. It means disappointed.



- by Francis S.

Christmas hasn't been a disappointment or a frustration this year. I coasted just enough on the residual thrill from my childhood that the season still imparts without expecting too much from it. There was a moment of longing to be with my parents and brothers and sister, an instinctual longing to relive those Christmases of my childhood that cannot possibly be relived, but it passed quickly.



And the Swedish Christmas celebration was more pleasing than I remember it. The present-giving, the watching of Kalle Anka - Donald Duck - on television (which the whole of Sweden watches at 3:00 p.m. on Christmas eve... a relatively new tradition carried on from the days when there was only one television channel, state-run of course, and the Disney movies weren't shown in Sweden for some reason, or so I am told) and the food. I suppose all that cold fish is beginning to grow on me.



- by Francis S.