I’m not very bothered by archaeological interpretations that are proven wrong. I’m afraid of those ideas that have become accepted even though there is no way they can ever be tested. “… it was common knowledge that local witches had killed old Mayor Niels Iversen Scribe by means of performing their bodily functions at his…

The Swedish Church lost 54,000 members last year. That’s more than half a percent of the country’s population. Yay! Eight years after submission, a star-crossed paper of mine has finally appeared in print! I was at this provincial museum in 2004, looking at finds, and the staff asked me for a paper to put in…

Some Facebook updates. Bolsängen: an Uppland smallhold whose name (thanks to the Swedish method of making compund nouns) means “the sexual intercourse bed”. The Poupon mustard brand got its name from the firm’s coprophiliac founder, who liked to encourage his staff with a friendly “Poop on, guys! Poop on!” I’m helping Adele Adkins with some…

Some recent Facebook updates of mine: After four years’ living in this house I just stubbed my toe on the bathrooom threshold for the first time — painfully. Unusually, I was wearing semi-industrial hearing protectors on my way to the john — because also unusually two people were watching TV at the same time and…

Selected Facebook updates: Dreamed that a podcaster had mixed ham, celery and rice crispies into my favorite tea leaves. Was very angry. Green tea leaves accumulate in our house way faster than we use them. Bothers my logistics brain. Misread a headline on a lady’s magazine. “A Retro-Style Wedding” became “A Hetero-Style Wedding”. Genital lambada,…

Selected Facebook updates: John Lennon offers a grammar lesson: “A working-class hero is something to be”. It’s an adjective and a noun. Not a verb. A friend of mine is rehearsing Orff’s Carmina Burana and not loving it: “I’m liking the work less with every rehearsal and we’re performing it three times in one week,…

These days I usually stick short updates of things I’m thinking about on my Facebook feed, and use the blog for longer pieces. But some of those snippets make me kind of happy, so here’s a selection of recent ones. I never give money to beggars. Instead I make an annual donation to Stockholm’s biggest…