There is a certain type of Stockholm restaurant that has 6- to 7-meter-high ceilings with lovely murals dimmed by decades of smoke, big windows of clear and lavender and pale green glass, and the original Jugend-style tables and chairs from circa 1910, the whole place disarmingly evocative of a bygone era. The food is invariably husmans kost - meatballs with mashed potatoes and lingonberries, or veal hash with an egg on top and beets on the side - in other words, good old-fashioned stick-to-your-ribs Swedish food that was assuredly as popular when the restaurant opened, nearly a century ago, as it is today.



Pelikan is my favorite of all these graceful old restaurants. Which is where the husband and I sat last night with A., the former model and aspiring producer and her fiancé, C., the photographer.



"They didn't give me exactly the salary I asked for, " A. told us, in between bites of potato. "But I'm going to take the job anyway."



A. is no longer an aspiring producer anymore. She has been promoted to assistant director.



Here's to you, A., the assistant director.



- by Francis S.

In case you were thinking of sending me an e-mail, I thought you should know that I have a new e-mail address.



- by Francis S.

I am a time optimist. If it's really important, I'm there on time. But if no one will be insulted or think I'm unprofessional or there's no plane to miss, I have trouble getting there exactly when I think I will.



So the husband, who had the day off, arrived armed with a lasagne and a princess tårta at the apartment of the priest and the policeman 20 minutes before I did. He was only 40 minutes late.



We are quite the horrible pair of time optimists.



By the time I'd arrived, the lasagne was half gone because the baby was fussing and hungry and her mother the priest wanted to get in her own meal before serving up another one.



After everyone was fed, the baby lay squirming against her mother's cheek, as newborn babies squirm. "Aren't her ears just so, so - I wish I could keep them in my wallet!" the priest said.



The Swedish word for the day is babybjörn. Swedes claim it's a Swedish invention - a baby carrier that allows you to strap your infant comfortably to your chest. Of course baby means baby, and björn means bear, as in the animal.



- by Francis S.

Signe's mother is a priest, her father is a policeman. She's three days old today.



Happy birthday, Signe, three days late.



The Swedish word for the day is välsignelse, the word from which the name Signe is derived. It means blessing.



- by Francis S.

Some two and half hours north of Stockholm by train stands a manor house outside an ancient iron works. If you're lucky enough to be a guest of one of Sweden's large paper mills, you'll get to stay in the house, which is owned by the mill and has been restored to within an inch of its quaint 250-year-old life, all painted ceilings and reconstructed wallpaper and Gustavian chairs painted grey-green. But not so authentic that the bathroom floors aren't heated.



If you're even luckier, you'll be taken out into the woods some 70 kilometers north, where a guide who is Sweden's version of Crocodile Dundee - shall we call him Moose Svensson? - will usher you into a frigid nursery where hundreds of thousands of tiny fir trees sit under dim lights and dripping ceilings, and your guide Mr. Svensson can pour an entire forest's worth of seeds into your open palm.



Then, the charming Mr. Svensson can drive even further into the wilderness, past a line where everything goes from being silvery with frost to being covered under a foot of snow. Deep in the woods, Mr. Svensson will hit upon real old-fashioned lumberjacks. Except these lumberjacks drive monstrous machines that clutch and saw and strip a tree in seconds, so that you can't help but feel sorry for the tree while still remaining utterly fascinated by the diabolical cleverness of it.



Then your Mr. Svensson can haul out rolls with soft cheese and chrome thermoses full of hot soup with the gamey rich taste of moose meat. And he can build a fire in the snow and make coffee that tastes like mud over the fire, and there will be a hardy nordic mosquito or two that have, to everyone's horror, survived the snow.



Then, the girls who are with you can scream, not because they've seen a bear or a moose, but rather a mouse. And you can make a silly Swedish English joke about seeing a mus, which sounds pretty much like moose, and tell it to all the girls who laugh at you. And to Mr. Svensson of course, whose eyes twinkle in a most delightful way and laughs like the best of them, as he takes you back to the mill and the train that will bring you home to the city.



The Swedish word for the day is plantskola. It literally means plant school, which brings all sorts of funny pictures to mind of little trees learning how to become the proper shade of green and grow upwards instead of sideways. However, the proper translation of the word would be nursery.



- by Francis S.

We sat holding our collective breath in the first balcony in the dark of the Stadsteatern, one of Stockholm's two great public theaters, waiting for the scene toward the end of the second act in A Doll's House where the poor maid gets slapped for no reason, no reason at all.



We'd been prepared by my friend the actress, who plays the maid.



Apparently, during one of the early performances, the actress who plays Nora, a renowned Swedish diva of sorts, had slapped my friend but good and hard. "That really hurt," my friend said to her afterwards. "Why did you do that?"



The diva of sorts went all apologetic. She was having a bad day, or someone was mean to her, or someone had slapped her, or something.



The next day, however, in anticipation of the slap, my friend flinched.



The diva of sorts hasn't done it again, although last night's slap looked pretty damned realistic to me.



We - M., the t.v. producer, A., the former model and aspiring producer, and a gaggle of A.'s friends who had all been schoolgirls together in gymnasium - were so happy when our friend the actress came out for her bows with the huge bouquet of flowers we'd sent to her dressing room, a bouquet far bigger and lovelier than the pathetic red stalk or two of gladiolus that the diva of sorts had.



It is, I have no doubt, the beginning of what will surely be a spectacular career.



My poor darling husband missed it all on account of he was working. And then he was too tired to join us at Café Beirut afterwards, where we stuffed ourselves on an embarrassing amount of little dishes of spicy sausages and eggplant salads and savory pastries and artichokes soaking in garlic and lemon. Then for dessert we smoked strange perfumey tobacco from a tremendous water pipe as we lolled about on silk cushions, stuffed to the tips of our ears down to the ends of our toes.



I guess I didn't last very long this round. I bought a pack of cigarettes at lunch this afternoon.



The Swedish phrase for the day is stor succé. It means great success.



- by Francis S.

The good thing about getting sick is that it always induces me to quit smoking. So it's been five days and I'm still not longing for a cigarette, not even with the unbelievable stress at work.



The Swedish word for the day is högmod. It means pride, and not in a nice way.



- by Francis S.