Life, Laughter and Everything Else

There is a mother and her child, a little girl about 6, sitting next to me on my way back to Stockholm. The girl is for some reason not very happy. She pulls the pink hood of her jacket over her blond her such that it covers most of her face and then she stares down at her legs defiantly. Her equally blonde mother bends over in front of her and talks to her in Swedish, in a  firm but patient tone, but the little girl does not respond. She pulls down the hood more tightly to express her annoyance with the one sided conversation. But if she was stubborn, she had inherited it from her mother, who does not give up. She attempts to lift up the hood but her daughter pulls it down firmly again. Instead of starting a tug of war, the mother continues her gentle persuasion, but the daughter is in no mood to listen. Then all of a sudden, she hugs her daughter and kisses her on her forehead. She does not let go but holds onto her daughter, tight. After a while, the child reciprocates and ...

There are two places I remember hearing the sound of silence. The first was in the basement of the NUS Library, in the middle of the towering shelves sheltering the ageing books, who seem to quietly bide their time in the world of tablets and smartphones. The second, that’s right here in my small room in Lappis, Stockholm, Sweden. It is a week and one day since I shifted my habitation more than a thousand miles from the sunny little island. Landing here, I set no high expectations of my new home. A few years ago, just half an hour in Snow City had taught me that winter was a foe. The heat of the sun can be tolerated, the wetness of the rain ignored, but the coldness of the winter, it never fails to remind you it is there. Cover your body all you want, but the coldness gets to you where your skin is bare and sometimes, where it is not. Even the ever enjoyable breeze switched side on the command of the winter, heaping more misery when it blows against you. Water runs down your no...