Smultron mellan blåbär: April 2026

Hello friends, I've just spent my spring break in the village of Cam in the Cotswolds. It feels like spring here with more and more birdsong from chiffchaffs, blackbirds, goldfinches, sparrows, titmice, magpies and jackdaws. The leaves seem to have popped out overnight, too. They are all unfurling in their soft, velvety freshness. During the month of April, the daylight increases by almost two hours in England.

The cottage I stayed in had two long-haired cats named Freya and Siggy and a spacious private garden for sitting out on nice days. My reading list included Bröd och mjölk by Karolina Ramqvist, Kometen kommer by Tove Jansson, the books on the Carnegie Medal for Writing shortlist, and Mansfield Park as an audiobook: 'If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out.' –Fanny Price in Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

Cam is nearby the villages of Dursley and Wotton-under-Edge, where I found a stash of vintage knitting patterns—a lot of Aran ones, for some reason. There's also a sweet bookshop and a natural foods shop in Wotton. I went on a couple of rambles during my visit as well as to Gloucester Cathedral for a performance of Bach's St John Passion by the cathedral choir and La Serenissima.