I finished the purple shawl yesterday and blocked it overnight. All done now.

Pattern: De nada. Yarn: a random find from Tradera.

There’s a lacy section and a section with a kind of broken ribbing.

The lacy section is more striking, but the ribbing has its place. Without it, the whole thing would look more boring.

The pattern photos showed the shawl blocked into a triangle shape, but mine would not stretch into a triangle even if I tried. I did block and pin it more forcefully than I usually do, because it was so shapeless otherwise, but there is no way that edge can be straightened.

The curve is a good thing. A straight-edged triangle might look better when the shawl is lying flat, but a curved shawl fits much better over my shoulders. If it was a triangle, there would be a lot more bunching at the neck.

Things are flowering everywhere, and it so lovely to see.

Ingrid’s weekends at home are busy, busy, busy. Spend time with me, Eric, Adrian, her boyfriend, her friends. Run errands. Rest and recuperate.

We squeezed in a quick round of Robo Rally this weekend. Ingrid won by a comfortable margin. Adrian and I kept going, and he was seconds away from getting to the goal when I more or less accidentally stepped in his way. At which point I hadn’t even reached the first of the three checkpoints.

It’s that time of the year! The garden is dominated by huge fluffy clouds of white cherry blossoms.

If there are anemones flowering in the garden, there should also be anemones elsewhere. I went for a walk through the anemone fields of Hansta.

The downside of going out walking on a beautiful, sunny spring day, on a public holiday to boot, is that a lot of other people will have had the same idea. When I first got to the path, it felt almost crowded. There were two groups just ahead of me, one behind me, and a fourth one came towards us in the other direction, all talking loudly. Not, like, large groups, just couples or families, but still – I felt surrounded by crowds. I got off the path and found a nice log to sit on for a time, while the others walked further away and the mood was more like what I had come for.

Finding a usable sitting log was a challenge of its own. There were a lot of ants everywhere.

The groups were soon out of earshot and forest was quiet again. This is one of Stockholm’s designated “quiet places”.

Ever since I read about how the number of tepals on anemones varies, I can’t help paying attention to them. I don’t know where Wikipedia’s sources observed their anemones: not here at least. Flowers with eight and nine tepals are not a majority here, but very much not rare.

There are small clumps of liverwort mixed up with the anemones here and there. Their flowers look so similar, while the rest of the plants are nothing like each other at all.

The main trail through the anemone forest isn’t long, maybe a kilometre, so I took a few meanders around it.

When I had zig-zagged there and walked all the way back, I realized that I had forgotten my sit pad at the far end, where I had paused for a drink of water. Walked all the way there again, and then of course back once more. I got more of a walk out of this small forest than I usually do.

I seem to have missed my photo today so here’s one from earlier.

Things I bought in Japan: shoelaces in flower-patterned fabric. A tiny bit of Japan, a tiny piece of beauty that I can sneak into my everyday life. Every time I tie my shoes, I get a little spark of joy.

I don’t usually buy souvenirs or even local crafts that are just for looking at. Instead I look for things that carry with them the character of the place, that I can use, in my daily life rather than on special occasions – even though few such purchases can be used quite this frequently.

It may be blowy and chilly and grey, but the world is so, so vibrantly green now. And light, well into the evening!

A colleague who had spent half a year in South America (Peru, I believe) said she appreciates spring much more here because it is such a contrast to winter. In Peru, everything was green all the time, so it became nothing special. For her, the grey dark winter months are worth it for the joy of seeing spring arrive. To me it’s more like… you’re getting beaten for half a year and then finally it stops. And yes, I’m glad that the beatings stop, but it’s not like I’d ask to be beaten just to enjoy that moment when it ends. I would absolutely much rather have spring all year round.

A double act at the Royal Opera – Serge Lifar’s Suite en blanc followed by William Forsythe’s In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated. I’m sure I’ve seen both before, in some other combination, even though I can’t find any mention of Lifar on the blog.

Suite en blanc is a technical demonstration. It is precise, symmetrical, beautiful – but nothing more. All skill, no soul. Artful but artificial. A pas de deux ends with the two gazing soulfully into each other’s eyes – but why? Without context, feeling, connection, it’s just empty posing and prancing. It is a series of poses and movements so disconnected from everything else that it draws all attention to the artificiality of it all, that ends up highlighting how ridiculous classical ballet actually is. Yes, beautiful, demanding, impressive, but also ridiculous. When eight women in white tulle skirts walk across the stage, in the quiet between the end of one tableau and the next, the tap-tap-tapping of their shoes comes across as silly. Why not cardboard cones on their heads instead of wearing tulle skirts?

In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated is still clearly ballet (rather than modern dance) in its movements and “language” but uses them so very differently. There is a push and a pull, a raw intensity, a presence. There is classical precision, and then a subtle sinuous wave of a torso, or a hanging arm. Absolutely wonderful.

Made fresh pasta for dinner, to practise the skills from the masterclass in Italy this weekend. It came out really nice, fluffy and tender.

Woke up early because I usually do. Also because I didn’t sleep particularly well. There was a noise from some kind of machinery in our hotel room – from my walking around I suspect that our room was situated right below a machine room – and I’m no longer used to sleeping with earplugs all night.

Anyway, this gave me nice views of the sunrise. The sun reached surrounding parts of the countryside and the town well before it reached the hotel terrace, since we’re on the inner edge of a crater lake and there’s a mountain to the east of us.

By the time the sun reached over the top of the mountain, it was quite high up already.

The first half of the day was knowledge activities again. We spent most of our breaks admiring the view over Lago Albano.

After lunch we had a couple of free hours, most of which I spent visiting the papal palace of Castel Gandolfo.

This morning I was viewing the palace from our hotel; now I got to look back from the palace towards the hotel.

Inside the palace there was a museum section, mostly exhibiting paintings of past popes and mannequins showing costumes of papal staff, such as the traditional clothes of the guards. Not particularly interesting.

A tall, austere staircase led to the pope’s residential quarters – mostly large rooms with paintings and tapestries on the walls, and luxurious chairs lining the edges of the rooms. Not much more interesting than the previous rooms.

The highlight of the palace was a huge tapestry from the Sistine Chapel, one of ten designed by Raphael. Five by five metres, showing the Conversion of Paul.

The information board in the room talked about the making of the tapestries – cartoons painted by Raphael and his workshop, tapestries woven by the workshop of Pieter van Aelst, this much money, this many years of work – but nothing about what happened to them later. Wikipedia tells me that the tapestries were looted and either burnt for their precious metal content or were scattered around Europe. Only in the late 20th century was a full set was reassembled again, of tapestries produced from the same cartoons after the first set.

Back outside I had just enough time for a quick lunch. My go-to solution in situations like this – limited time, tourist town, beautiful weather – is to find a local bakery and buy whatever local bread-with-toppings they have, and then eat it at a park bench or similar.

In some countries this can be a triangle sandwich, in others a wrap, pierogi or pasties. Here it was a kind of flatbread with grilled tomatoes. A pinsa, I guess. I didn’t find a park nor a bench, but there was a shaded little walkway from the town centre down towards the lake, with a very sitting-friendly low wall to one side.