One Week's Blog (23-30 July)

Old Älvsborg and the Carnegie Brewery

Carnegie Brewery complex from Älvsborgs bridge, originally uploaded by Gothenburg Observer.

(Sunday 23rd July) Today I made a small photo study of the old Carnegie porter brewery at Klippan. Actually I was trying to find my way to the ruins of the original Älvsborg – the fortress which once guarded the Swedish possessions on the river (älv), and which was captured by the Danes and ransomed, not once but twice, in 1570 and 1613. The second ransom, paid between 1613 and 1619, was set at 1 million silver dollars, equivalent to 25 000 kilos of silver. It was after this that the present city of Gothenburg was founded, and is the reason the city was built not only as a trading centre but also as what was for many years the most well-defended city in northern Europe. As part of the defences, Älvsborg was moved out to an island in the river, and the old fortress fell into disuse. Now it lies in overgrown ruins, protected by a few sheets of corrugated iron and surrounded by the bulk of the brewery which grew up on the site many years later. Times change, and even the brewery has passed on. A huge amount of demolition and rebuilding is going on around the site, and I wasn’t able to find my way in to the ruins of the fortress, but I was able to take some pictures from a distance. Instead, I wandered around the buildings of the brewery which are being used for all sorts of small enterprises. The brewery started life as a sugar refinery, founded by a German immigrant in 1808, but in 1836 it was taken over by the Scottish entrepreneur, David Carnegie. For more than 100 years, it supplied the beer, and especially the porter, with which the growing numbers of industrial workers in Gothenburg and the rest of Sweden slaked their thirst after hard days in shipyards, foundries and mines.

Gamla Älvsborg from Carnegie building site, originally uploaded by Gothenburg Observer.

Screaming in frustration
(Monday 24th July) Today I uploaded my first 'blog of the week' (just after midnight – having spent most of Sunday evening writing it). I also wrote and uploaded my first 'Progress Report'. Generally I was feeling very happy with myself and the progress I was making. Then I spent hours composing, cropping and formatting illustrations in order to upload them to Blogger, as I had done at the beginning of the previous week in the week for the 'Introduction' and 'The Story So Far'. It didn’t work. And it kept on not working: I couldn’t believe it, and was convinced I must be doing something wrong, but no matter what I tried, I had no joy. I started to read the FAQs and realised I wasn’t alone in having just this problem. There are plenty of suggestions for 'work arounds', but it all takes so much time and I really don’t want to spend hours of my life trying to pick my way through this solution or that, trying to edit HTML I only half understand. I end up screaming blasphemies at the computer, the Internet, Blogger …

Off day
(Tuesday 25th July) Spent another miserable day failing to make Blogger work, setting up an account with Flickr, failing to make Flickr and Blogger co-operate. By mid-afternoon I’m no longer screaming with frustration. Instead I’m working myself down into a depression, calculating all the time spent – read wasted – on this project. Thinking about all the work I’ll have to put in to my new teaching year (starting 14th August). This project’s 6-8 month time span is a joke. In the afternoon, because she felt sorry for me, my public persuaded me to meet her from work and go to the fun fair at Liseberg. We went to see the young (nowadays, I suppose, youngish) Gothenburg magician, Carl-Einer Häckner, who has become an institution on Liseberg’s open-air stage. This was the 10th year of his summer variety show and he did a series of clips from his previous shows. Most appreciated (by the younger members of the audience), was the blood and guts magic (cutting off his ear, mangling his thumb, sawing off his arm). His showmanship is inspired by Tommy Cooper, but he enjoys performing in the context of a story. I don’t think this comes across so well on the big open-air stage. He also enjoys singing sentimental songs which I can do without. Nobody in the audience seemed agree with me on either point, though. The place was packed, even under a blazing sun. Apart from Häckner there was a German Buster Keaton-inspired acrobat-cum-mime, who was rather good, and a couple of English roller-skate performers who were boring: Round and round and round and how many ways can the fat man hold the thin woman so she flies out as he spins? Still depressed after the show. Beer and crisps and chocolate do not help.

Häckner, originally uploaded by Gothenburg Observer.

Day off
(Wednesday 26th July) I wrote up 'Dreaming' and published it, feeling much more stable. After this, I decided to take the rest of the day off from the project.

Tales the toad told
(Thursday 27th July) In the afternoon to town for the Paddan tour. Paddan is Swedish for toad, and the Paddan boats are sightseeing boats – low, flat, broad motorised barges – which give a 'toad’s eye view' (quote from their ad) of the town. I’ve done this trip before, long ago, but I remember it as more interesting. Perhaps it’s just that I know more about the town now, perhaps I am more critical after having taught history intensively for five years. I make a list of 'Tales the Toad Told' – half-truths and disinformation – for future analysis. The sun beats down and though there is some respite on the water, by the time the trip comes to an end, the only thing I want to do is get under the shade of some trees and drink water. In the park, dozens of men and women, dressed in wool, linen and leather (skirts, britches, waistcoats, blouses), are walking around, dancing or playing instruments. What was that about mad dogs and Englishmen?

Hop, originally uploaded by Gothenburg Observer.

Practical problems melt away ...
(Friday 28th July) After looking again at Flickr’s instructions and making some adjustments, Hallelujah! The photos work. Spent the morning uploading pictures and getting them to show where I wanted them in the blog. I met Martin for lunch. Martin is one of my sounding boards for this project. When he isn’t sounding, he’s hounding me to get on with it … Whenever I speculate about doing something, Martin wants to know when I’m going to do it. Publish a draft of the first chapter as a PDF file? Sure, when? Record it as an MP3 file? When will that be available? Martin is very optimistic on my behalf – in discussion, practical problems melt away. I come away from the meeting feeling even more buoyed up than I felt this morning – it’s only on the way home I remember about the Blogger/Flicker photo frustration.

In the park

Slätta damm with white and yellow waterlillies, originally uploaded by Gothenburg Observer.

(Saturday 29th July) The heat continues. We take a long,but necessarily slow walk in Hisingspark photographing lillies and ferns, and pass S.A. Hedlund’s Guest Book. Once upon a time, S.A. Hedlund, the proprietor of a Gothenburg newspaper, used to have a summer residence here. Then, it was a boat across the river and a carriage ride from there, well out of town. Now it’s about ten minutes on the bus from the city centre. Part of the Hedlund estate is built over with four storey blocks of flats, part has been amalgamated into a larger area of greenery with a series of small lakes, rocky hills and woods, Hisingspark. Hedlund was a man whose interests and profession coincided so that he enjoyed the company of the famous men and women of his day. Literary lions such as Ibsen, explorers like Nansen and Sven Hedén, writers and feminists such as Ellen Key and Frederika Bremen, all visited his summer residence. Their visits are commemorated in the guest book: on the surface of a granite cliff face near what used to be the entrance to the estate, the names of all Hedlund’s famous visitors are recorded, carved into the rock and picked out with yellow paint. (In Hedlund’s day it was gold leaf.) There are about 70 names, but only one of them looks as if it might be British. In fact, W. W. Thomas Jr. was an American – one of Abraham Lincoln’s Civil War consuls. Later, he served as the US Ambassador in Stockholm and wrote a massive book – Sweden and the Swedes – at least a third of which is taken up with his hunting, shooting and fishing expeditions. He seemed to have been determined to kill at least one example of every form of Swedish wild life. I think he’s included in Hedlund’s guest book more for his translations to English of the poems and journalism of Viktor Rydberg, Hedlund’s protégé and employee.
(On second thoughts, I suppose Ellen Key’s name could be taken for English, but she wasn't. According to the Swedish Wikipedia, her family are distantly related to the Scottish MacKeys).

Another year older
(Sunday 30th July) My birthday. Let us draw a veil over this. I end the day sitting on the balcony in the cool of the evening, re-reading Coasting.

Paddan = Toad. One of the motorised sightseeing barges carrying visitors around the waters of Gothenburg., originally uploaded by Gothenburg Observer.

Hallelujah!

Finally I have managed to get the photos I want, more or less the way I want them, inserted into my earlier blogs. Talk about blood sweat and tears. (Ok, the blood is hyperbole.) Take a look! And if you want to see more pictures on the Gothenburg theme, I will be adding them periodically to my new site at Flickr where I go under the name of Gothenburg Observer. Site URL: http://www.flickr.com/photos/obsgothenburg/
Cheers!

Dreaming

Last night I had a dream (or it may have been two dreams, they soaked into one another). It was a hot night and I’d eaten too much before going to bed, so I slept badly. I’d eaten too much too late because I was feeling depressed and eating is my comfort. I was depressed and unhappy and frustrated by Blogger.com, which has swallowed more time than I want think about these past two days as I’ve been trying to make pictures appear alongside my writing. But I’d also got myself into a state over this whole project and was letting myself get stressed out by the time scale. A stupid thing to do as the project is entirely voluntary and the deadlines, at least at this stage, are completely arbitrary.

The Chinese box
So, anyway, I slept badly and I dreamed. In the dream I was 8 or 9 years old playing with a Chinese box. It was about 7 inches broad by about 6 inches wide and perhaps 3 inches deep. Intricately carved on all its sides and top (the bottom was smooth). Something rolled about inside, not in every direction, just when I tilted it forward or back, so I imagined it was a cylinder or something like a cylinder. There were no obvious hinges or locks, so I turned the box about in my hands trying to open it.

Now this was something which has happened to me in real life. When I was a child, I was staying with my foster aunt, Jill, a close friend of my mother. Jill’s house was crammed with curios which she had picked up in her travels, or which people had given her, and the Chinese box was one of these things. In the real event, the box was empty and Jill had given it to me and challenged me to open it. After what seemed like half an hour, I gave up and admitted being baffled. Then Jill showed me the two slender pieces of wood that had to be slid in sequence, one to release the lock-strip, the other, the lock-strip itself, to release the lid, and how the lid then slid smoothly off. There was no metal, all the parts were finely carved in wood.

In my dream, I remembered this, and turned the box over and over, pressing and pushing with my fingers and thumbs, trying to find a piece of the box that would slide. But I found nothing, and the little cylinder in side rolled back and forth, each time with a little clunk, and it was driving me crazy.

The lump of clay
Then the dream shifted and instead of holding the Chinese box, I was holding a lump of clay about the size of two fists. It was the sort of clay used to throw earthenware pots, a light ochre brown, and glistening because it been dipped in water. It was as if I intended to throw it, but I had no potter’s wheel to throw it on, instead I was holding it in my hands, shifting it from hand to hand, turning it around and around. Searching.

Gradually, it came to me that I was a sculptor looking for the right angle at which to begin cutting. In my dream this seemed perfectly sensible, even though it’s actually more than a bit odd. Stone or wood sculptures usually begin with this turning around while the sculptor looks for the point of attack. Michelangelo – I think it’s Michelangelo – is supposed to have said that in every piece of stone there is a statue hidden, and it is the sculptor’s job to identify the hidden form and to cut away the surrounding matter n order to release it. Clay sculpture is rarely a matter of subtraction – cutting away. It’s more of a process of addition. Most clay sculpting starts from a frame and builds up to a completed figure.

Be that as it may, there I was holding this lump of wet clay and turning it around, just as I’d turned the box. There was no feeling of anything rolling about inside, however, though I was convinced there was something there, something that, if I could just find the right angle of attack would become a beautiful thing. But I found nothing, and the clay seemed to become wetter and wetter as I turned it (though I wasn’t dipping it in water), and more and more loose. It squeezed out between my fingers like mud, which it was fast becoming. The more I turned it, the wetter it became and the more escaped between my fingers until the ball of clay had shrunk down to something I could hold in the palm of one hand, into a puddle of mud cupped in my palm and trickling down my wrist.

Coda
When I woke, the first thing I thought of was this quatrain from Fitzgerald’s Khayyam:

For in the marketplace, one dusk of day
I watched the potter thumping his wet clay,
And with its all obliterated tongue
It murmured: “Gently, brother, gently, pray!”

An interpretation
I’ve got an interpretation, but having written all the above, I can see how it might give a Freudian a field day. Well, let ‘em have their fun.

Here’s what I think it means:

I am trying to write something, but I am not clear in my own mind exactly what I’m trying to do. I have material, but I don’t know what to make of it or where to start. A part of me believes there is an intellectual solution (that’s the business of opening the Chinese box), but another part of me is looking for inspiration (the clay sculpture). At the same time I have a fear that the material I have and am collecting (and possibly the whole project) may be irrelevant, (the clay which turns to mud and runs through my fingers). There’s also a reflection of my frustration over Blogger (being unable to get to the cylinder – which might be a cylinder of photographic film). On the whole, I think the dream would have been quite depressing, if not for the poetic coda. I actually found that quite encouraging. I read it like this: my subconscious is telling me not to over-exert myself, not to get stressed, to go gently.

Blog with photos (17-22 July)

The copper mare

(Monday 17th July) The first Gothenburg was founded by Karl IX in 1607 - and burned to the ground by the Danes in 1611. Three hundred years after the event, to commemorate the first foundation, a copper statue of the king, riding on a charger, was commissioned and unveiled. The statue is known in Gothenburg as Kopparmärra - The copper mare. This is one of those witticisms for which Gothenburgers are famous (at least in their own lunchtimes). The horse is obviously a stallion. Every so often a local newspaper will print a letter from a visitor or foreign resident who hasn't cottoned on, calling for the name to be changed. These letters are also considered a great joke.

Kopparmärra - The Copper Mare at Kungsportsplatsen

The Copper Mare - a detail. Just so there's no doubt!

Hasselblad
(Tuesday 18th July) Where was the first camera on the moon made? Correct! It was made in Gothenburg by Victor Hasselblad AB. But that was then. Hasselblad, who have been making cameras since 1941, made the mistake of not taking digital technology seriously. Believing their reputation for excellence was proof against any newfangled electronic claptrap, and the downturn they were experiencing was a temporary event, in 2004, they moved production from their old established quarter at Lilla Bommen to a new purpose built prestige site across the river. Almost immediately they found themselves teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. A couple of mergers and buy-outs down the line and they've given up their fine, new, very expensive building and have moved into an old warehouse. The prestige building is being converted to accommodate local TV and radio stations and the original building, Hasselbladska house, at Lilla Bommen is being converted into luxury apartments. On Klädpressaregatan the demolition is in full swing of the more modern accretions to the Hasselbladska house. I watched as a wrecking crane pulled down wall after wall and the builders sprayed water to damp down the dust which anyway swirled around.

The original Hasselblad head office at Lilla Bommen - soon to become 24 luxury appartments ... And below, Hasselblad house from behind.

Hasselbladska hus from behind, originally uploaded by Gothenburg Observer.

Supercargo
(Wednesday 19th July) This is the life! Coffee and croissants for breakfast on the balcony. Headline in today's paper "Celebration as Götheburg reaches the Pearl River". The "Götheburg" is the replica east-indiaman, built here and sailing to Canton to commemorate the Swedish East India Company and to promote Swedish-Chinese trade. On my list of people to research is Colin Campbell, one of the original founders of the Swedish East India Company and Supercargo on the first voyage to Canton in 1732 and 1733. Campbell kept a handwritten journal which surfaced in the sales catalogue of an antequarian bookseller in New York only in 1986. It had been carried away to Scotland from Sweden sometime in the 1760s by Campell's friend and fellow director, Charles Irvine and remained in the Irvine family archives in Drum Castle, Aberdeenshire for 200 years or so until being sold by Irvine's descendants. The original manuscript was bought by Gothenburg University library, and an annotated version of the journal was published in 1996. I must try to lay my hands on a copy.

Vasagatan
(Thursday 20th July) On Vasagatan, I passed a group of Americans. Even from a distance there was something unusual about them, though I couldn't put my finger on it. They were cheerful and all of them dressed for the summer - except the two young men. Dark suits, ties, badges. The penny dropped as I was passing them. Mormons. The two young men were missionaries ("elders" as they like to call themselves) and the the rest were their families come to cheer them along. Why do Mormon missionaries have to dress like they are FBI men from 1950s movies? The men, that is. Women missionaries (of whom there are few) seem required to look like housewives from the boondocks in the 1930s. Is the Mormon Church trapped in a time warp? I think we need to know.

The sun through an alley of trees on Vasagatan

Friday 21st
My public read the first draft of the first sectrion (completed today). One laugh. (Good!) One complement. (Very good!) One criticism. (Justified.) One suggestion: Get in some sex. Well, I suppose this is Sweden ...

Älvsborgsbron from Masthugget, originally uploaded by Gothenburg Observer.

Squawks-from-lampposts
(Saturday 22nd July) Late this evening, looking down from the balcony, we saw five seagulls walking about on the patch of grass under a streetlamp, pecking at the ground. It was dark and we saw them at first only because they were so white against the ground. We'd have taken them for pigeons, but even from directly overhead, a seagull doesn't look much like a pigeon. But there they were, silent, waddling about, pecking. This is very unusual behaviour. We decided that they were secretly trying out pigeon behaviour. Trying, perhaps, to see if they could find out whether pigeons know something seagulls don't, and doing it secretly so no other seagulls would see them and screech at them. We had just spent 4 hours watching Dances with Wolves on TV. Decided that if other seagulls saw them, they would have to live the rest of their seagull lives with names like "Pecks-with-pigeons" or "Waddles-on-grass" instead of brave seagull names like "Squawks-from-lampposts" or "Shits-on-cars".

Progress Report 1

From now on, I’m going to try to separate out my musings on the technical progress (or otherwise) of the book from other entries. If you, dear reader, are only interested in the experiment, you only need to read the entries flagged as Progress Reports. If you are more interested in pictures of Gothenburg and little anecdotes about the city, go for the other bits. OK?

Gress
There was a moment this week – a grey morning around 5 a.m. – when I wondered whether I would be able to call this a progress report. Gress there had been, but whether pro- or retro- (or in- or e-) I didn’t know. Later the same day, though, I completed the first draft of my first section, and started to feel better.

On Monday 17th, after having managed to get Blogger.com to work for me (more or less) and posted my first two blogs, I set out for town. First stop was a stationer’s to buy a notebook and a pen. Chatwin supposedly used a French notebook called ‘moleskine’. This is now produced in Italy. (Go to http://www.modoemodo.com/ and click on ‘history’ and ‘stories’.) I did look at them, but I didn’t like the soft covers, and the only hardbacks on sale were reporters’ notebooks and too small. At getting on for 150 Skr for one book, I also thought they were ridiculously expensive. Instead, I bought a locally produced hardback notebook (lined paper) for 29 Skr. (Ten Swedish kronor is worth about 1 Euro, 75 British pence or 1.30 US dollars.)

I also wanted a retractable ballpoint pen – a Bic or something similar – which I thought ought to be easy to find. No, no. All pens must be ‘jell’ pens nowadays. Horrible stuff. Blots almost as much as a fountain pen. A pencil then? Swedes seem to use propelling pencils for preference, but I don’t like them. I don’t like pencils. It probably has to do with age and habit (and bad eyesight). In the end I was able to find a ballpoint I was satisfied with, though it cost me more than my notebook (32 Skr). Worked fine for two days and then started to blot … Sigh. I should have gone with the jell pen and not kicked up such a fuss. But you know us artists :-)

Then I sat in a café and numbered the first 30 pages in the notebook. This is also something Chatwin is supposed to have done, but it’s not an affectation. It helps if you’re writing a lot and jotting down ideas of all sorts as they come to you. With numbered pages, you can produce a running index or list of contents and find your ideas again when you need them. It’s also a good way to overcome the moment of totally blank panic that overcomes you (well, me anyway) when you actually sit down to write something. No matter how much I think I have to write, an empty sheet of paper which I’m supposed to be filling with “deathless prose” can chase everything else out of my head as soon I sit down to it. (That “deathless prose” is Lawrence Durrell reported by his younger brother Gerald, by the way.) Numbering a few pages is a way to distract your mind for a moment in order to let the words start to come. It also helps if you want to calculate numbers of words written, which for this project, I do.

Jonathan Raban
Just so you know I don’t have a monomania about Bruce Chatwin, another of my role models is Jonathan Raban, author of Coasting. This is a perfect little book which manages – seemingly without effort – to combine travel with history and biography, and literary criticism with navigation, at the same time as it presents a many-faceted picture of Britain at the end of the 20th century. Here’s a reading tip! Read Coasting immediately before or after reading Paul Theroux’s Kingdom by the Sea. They were both written at the same time, they’re both based on a journey around Britain – Theroux walked clockwise around the coast, Raban sailed anti-clockwise – and they both describe meeting one another (in Brighton, my home town). The Theroux book is well-written, interesting and a lot of fun, but Raban’s book has all that and a depth of thought, a perspective which puts a completely different spin on the things he reports. Let’s face it, I’d be hard pressed to write as well as Theroux, but (apart from Chatwin) it’s Raban I’d like to measure myself against.

In one chapter of Coasting, Raban plays the tourist in London. I have decided to do the same here in Gothenburg – at least for a time. (For more on Raban, there seems to be a new Internet site devoted to him at http://www.jonathanraban.com/ – go look.)

Touristing
So, most of this week has been devoted to touristing – not a hard job exactly, though in the hot weather we’ve been having, not as easy as it might have been. My days have looked more or less like this: Mornings I sit and write on my laptop, working on the first draft of the book or reading in my various sources. Afternoons, I go into town and walk around, stopping off in cafés, parks and museums as the occasion presents itself. I’ve been working my way through two books: One on the stories behind some of the street sculpture in Gothenburg (Statyer berätter by Bengt Öhnander). The other is a brief presentation of some of the city’s listed buildings (K- – for Kultur – marked) called 100 utmärkta hus i Göteborg. I bought these at the Tourist Information office on Monday. Sometimes there’s something new, more often (I’m pleased to be able to say) they remind me of something I have heard before.

What I’m collecting as I tourist are: a) much of the diary entries (bits of which may appear in this blog, though not under this heading); and b) most of the photos (some of which will show up here, others of which will be the basis for illustrations in the book). My reading however is mostly to remind myself of Gothenburg’s history and track down the details of some of the more interesting stories.

Words
Well, well. I started writing this early on Sunday morning, and now we’re into the small hours of Monday, so let me wrap things up with a quick word tally. In the 7 days between Sunday 16th and Saturday 22nd I have written, by my count:
4000 words approx in the diary
2790 words in the first draft of the first section – this includes some quotation
1275 words in the two blogs published Mon 17th
1100 words in various texts which may turn out to be part of other sections of the draft.
9165 words total for the week
= c.1300 words/day for 7 days.
My target was 2000 words/day, so I’m falling short, but it’s still quite respectable. We'll see how it goes next week.

Göta Älv from Masthugget, originally uploaded by Gothenburg Observer.

The Story So Far

Having decided to do this at last, I'm getting quite excited about starting. We've been in England this past couple of weeks, but I've been turning ideas over in my mind wondering how to go about things. The start is always difficult. I can say that with benefit of experience since I've started many writing projects. The end, though, that's even worse - at least I think so, I've so very rarely got to the end of any major writing project. As for the middle ... I'm beginning to get cold feet.


I'm writing this before having set up the blog site where it will appear, so I'm already thinking it might be better to pull the plug now before I embarrass myself in front of more people. (I have so far told only four people about this, all of whom have heard about my writing projects before and are not going to have their opinions of me much undermined by one more which doesn't get off the ground.) But the whole point of risking a more public pratfall is that it might give me the impetus actually to succeed.

So on we go.

We returned to Sweden last Tuesday, 12th July, and on the plane I was thinking about beginnings and endings, arrivals and departures. Three weeks earlier, I had intended that the final work would be a kind of personal magazine, with sections taken from various of my unfinished projects - the Book of Beasts, Viking Words, Sweden Observed. But then I re-read Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia, the kaleidoscope twisted and everything looked different. Chatwin's book was probably the seminal book for the post-modern generation of travel writers. In it, he travels to Patagonia, apparently in pursuit of the true story behind a relic from his childhood - the piece of mylodon skin which his grandmother kept in a glass-fronted cabinet in her dining room. He travels the length and breadth of Patagonia, ending up in Tierra del Fuego, and recounts the stories of the people (especially the British and people of British descent) that he meets, and the places that he visits. The book is a snapshot of southern Argentina and Chile in 1976, but it is also, at least to some degree, a work of fiction. Although the structure appears simple - travelled here, spoke with this person, slept here, saw this - in fact it is put together with considerable artifice. After the book was published, some of the people identified and quoted protested that Chatwin had put words into their mouths, and even the character of "Bruce Chatwin" may be fictional - at least to some degree.

I am not going to pretend that I can emulate Chatwin, but I can aspire, no?


I've also been thinking about marketing. As I noted in Intentions, my objective is to interest enough people to be able to sell at least 100 copies of the final book and/or to break even. I think I'll have a better chance of doing this if I give the book a sharper focus. So out goes the magazine idea, and in comes Gothenburg. I've lived in Gothenburg for 8 years now, ever since the early months of 1998. My wife comes from the city, and we lived here for two years also just after we were married in the mid '80s. Gothenburg is Sweden's second city, and has a relationship with Stockholm rather like that of Manchester with London or Glasgow with Edinburgh. It's also a city with an interesting history. It has been the gateway to Sweden for visitors from abroad since the early 1600s, and Sweden's gateway to the west forlonger even than the city has existed. There many stories to be told (or re-told), and there have been many ideas expressed about Gothenburg, just as there are many ideas currently in circulation. Gothenburgers are proud of their city, they don't compare Gothenburg with Stockholm (except to disparage Stockholm), but are happy to tell you that Gothenburg is "Little London". (In fact, "Little Glasgow" might be more appropriate, but more of that later. Perhaps.)


For some years I've been collecting material for an anthology of writing in English about Sweden - working title: Sweden Observed. But I've also been toying with the idea of a travel book using some of the same stuff. So my current thought is to use the historical material I have collected where it refers to Gothenburg, weaving it into an account of a tourist's exploration of the city today. I have three weeks of holiday coming up (one of the few benefits left to the teaching profession). These will give me a chance to establish contexts for my story.

Later
The above was written on Friday and Saturday (15th-16th July). Today I have established the blog, learned about templates and uploading pictures and discovered that a picture with poster edges doesn't look very good as a thumbnail, which may partly explain the rather washed-out portrait on my profile. The circle of friends who know my plans has grown, I have begun to fill a notebook with ideas. I have also been out for a Swedish summer-style walk in the woods (bare feet) and helped nature along by contributing blood to three mosquito families. (I come up in boils after mosquito bites - only Scandinavian mosquitoes, not British ones - and now have three lovely ones, two on my left foot and one on my right. Gritting my teeth and trying not to scratch. At least my feet are no longer cold.)

I don't intend to update this blog on a daily basis, but I hope to be adding something at least once a week - perhaps more often in the first month or so.



Even later
Hm, some trouble uploading pictures, but I seem to have overcome it now. (It seems as though Blogger doesn't like long titles on jpeg files.) What should be showing are four variations on the Gothenburg city lion. First some flags on Kungsports Avenue with the modern emblem and the city's modern Swedish name, Göteborg. Then a painted lion (from the side of one of the city's older trams). After that there ought to be an embossed lion (from one of the bollards around the city art gallery - konstmuséet). And finally, to the right here, there a lion peeping over the edge of a parapet on Södra Hamngatan.

Intentions

My intention with this blog is to document the development of an experiment. The goal of the experiment is to create a web site and printed book, to be called Observing Gothenburg. In doing this, I want to explore the possibilities for self-publishing afforded by modern technology, and to teach myself how to go about it. My immediate objectives are, by the end of November this year (2006), to have created an Internet site and a printed book. The Internet site to have commercial and non-commercial facilities for downloading texts, images and sound files; the book to be available as an illustrated, printed text (utilising print-on-demand technology), and also as a spoken-word text (in MP3 format or equivalent).

By providing myself with a publishing opportunity and deadline, I hope to encourage myself to complete writing a book, (something which I have, to date, signally failed to manage without a publisher's deadline). When completed, I intend to use the book as a sort of portfolio. With this, I hope to influence commercial publishers, agents and others to take an interest in my work and creative ideas. The objective of this blog and of the Internet site, will be to advertise the book (and myself).

I am fully aware that most self-published books sell few copies commercially. From what I've been reading, it seems typical that only about 100 copies are sold - often, I guess, to the author and his or her immediate circle. Still, 100 copies sold seems a reasonable target for the book and I will be very satisfied with sales which allow me to break even. At the moment, I don't know whether 100 copies sold will be above or below the break-even point, but this blog gives me a place to identify the costs and the break-even point as I go along.


This is me.