Isle of Wight

When we went to bed, the lights of Dover shimmered on the horizon as we slipped through the English Channel. Behind us was another grand dinner in Queen’s Grill, this time with maple carrots accompanied by a bottle of Cunard’s own red, a Grenache–Syrah–Mourvèdre blend. Overnight the rain set in as we traced the British coastline toward the Isle of Wight.

Our last morning aboard was a busy one, with all guests – even those continuing to New York – required to go through immigration formalities in Southampton. Much of the time was spent queuing before we could finally disembark and catch Southwestern Railway’s 9 a.m. service to London.

Looking back on our maritime adventure, it feels like we truly experienced everything I had hoped for. Just as in 2007, when we travelled to Ireland together, it has been a joy to share the journey with my dad and hear his many anecdotes from a life spent crisscrossing Europe’s railways. Ahead of us lies one final day in London before we fly home tomorrow afternoon to Copenhagen and Malmö, where I am already looking forward to dinner with my childhood friend Gabriel.

Queen’s Grill

Being shown to our table by a lovely lady from Zimbabwe, my dad and I were seated right in the middle of the Queen’s Grill restaurant for our first dinner aboard. Moments later, the sommelier Dragan – “Dragon,” as our waitress teasingly called him – appeared, and we could finally begin the experience I had been most curious about ever since Cunard accepted our shameless upgrade bid a month ago.

For review purposes (and perhaps to the sommelier’s quiet disappointment), my dad and I ended up ordering the same things throughout our three-course dinner. Still, every dish was flawless. The salmon tartare with a glass of Pinot Grigio from Venice was a perfect opener, but the main dish – tandoori lamb –was nothing short of divine. To go with it, we both chose a La Meule Pinot Noir from Languedoc-Roussillon, which I will definitely try to hunt down once back in Sweden. For dessert, we went with cheese and Port, a combination that brought me straight back to my once-in-a-lifetime Singapore Airlines flight on Christmas Eve 2008, somewhere above the red deserts of Australia.

At sea

Waking up after eight solid hours of sleep, my dad and I were greeted by a spectacular sunrise from our stateroom balcony. Cruising at a gentle 15 knots a few dozen miles off the Frisian Islands, we began our day at sea with a visit to the gym – far better equipped than the online reviews had suggested. With two rowing machines and a full suite of Technogym gear (the same brand as my local Nordic Wellness, by the way), I felt instantly at home, and it was fun to introduce my dad to some of my favourite machines.

Afterwards, we joined the transatlantic tradition of walking laps on the promenade deck, taking in the morning light glinting off the waves. By 8 a.m., breakfast was served in the Queen’s Grill, where Cunard lived up to its reputation with perfect Eggs Royale and strong Italian coffee.

Changed into swimwear, we headed back to the aft deck pool on deck 7, where I managed to log 500 metres of swimming before settling into the rhythm of shipboard life. Between dips in the pool, browsing in the library on deck 8, and a stop at the Commodore Club for a bit of conversation, the hours passed easily until our Churchill enrichment lecture in the ship’s planetarium by historian Andrew J. Baker.

Some passengers say they would fear boredom on a full transatlantic crossing – but judging from this day alone, I doubt my dad or I would feel that way.

Sail away

Breezing through the formalities at the Steinwerder Cruise Terminal, my dad and I boarded the Queen Mary 2 in the early afternoon. Entering the ship on deck 3, we at first missed some of its grandeur as we had to locate our muster station, but over the following hours we began to discover what would be our home for the coming two days.

At 3.30 p.m., we indulged in a very British afternoon tea in the Princess Lounge: finger sandwiches, warm scones, and lemon cake, all served with piping hot Earl Grey that would have made Jean-Luc Picard proud. Afterwards, my dad and I slipped into the pool on the aft deck, soaking up the late-summer sun over an Aperol Spritz mixed with Cunard’s own sparkling wine.

At 6 p.m., the ship’s horn finally sounded, and this majestic liner of 149,215 tonnes eased away from the quay, beginning its 400-mile journey to Southampton and the British Isles under the command of Irish captain Tomás Connery. Sitting on our balcony, we watched as the busy port traffic of Hamburg slowly gave way to the green fields of Niedersachsen and the unexpected serenity of slow river cruising along the Elbe.

Alster

Having mentioned The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare to my dad on the train down to Hamburg, we of course had to watch the whole movie once we got to our room at the Prize Hotel (Radisson’s latest budget brand) on Recha-Lübke-Damm.

 

Five short hours of adrenaline-stressed sleep later, I laced up my grey “Hoka Harbour Mist” Cliftons (what else?) for twelve faster photo-interval kilometres around lake Alster and into the old town of Hamburg. There is something about running through leafy German neighbourhoods with white-stucco mansions that gets me every time.

Passing the Hotel Atlantic, which opened in 1909 to accommodate passengers of the Hamburg-Amerika Linie and was later used as a backdrop in Tomorrow Never Dies, felt like the perfect way of connecting the dots. After a short Teams meeting with my colleagues in Halmstad, the plan is to take a walk with dad before heading out by taxi to the port, where the Queen Mary 2 is waiting for us.

Nytorv

After running around my favourite Skatås trails with Anna at 6 am, my dad and I left Gothenburg with the first high-speed service at 8 am to start our great maritime adventure. Jumping off early in Helsingborg, despite our Malmö tickets, we delivered some train tickets to one of my dad’s customers who was about to go hiking along the Camino de Santiago, and then took the all-electric ferry “Tycho Brahe” across to Helsingør for a Hamlet detour.

Once in Copenhagen, we had the obligatory smørrebrød and Carlsberg before walking around town which was just as lovely as when I left it with Anna in June. Now on the train again in a classic Avmz first class car, we have about five hours across golden fields and the Great Belt bridge before we arrive in Hamburg at 9 pm tonight.

Mist and premonitions

With the train leaving tomorrow morning, I decided to forgo today’s Parkrun and instead join Anna for a sunrise jog, passing mist-covered lakes and catching the first premonitions of autumn.

Before my dad arrives from Kalmar at 2 pm, I plan to wrap up the last slides on statistical inference for my methods class, so I will leave it at that for now. Still, I hope to post one more update here on Rawls & Me before boarding in Hamburg on Monday.

Lemon sponge cake

Returning to Gothenburg after two intensive days in Halmstad, I allow myself the indulgence of SJ’s new lemon sponge cake as I reflect on today’s lecture by our new guest professor Jonas Linderoth. Having made a name as one of the strongest advocates of cognitivism and evidence-based thinking in recent Swedish school debates, much of what Linderoth said resonated with me.

Yet, there is something in his singular focus on “what works” that troubles me when applied to higher education. What ideally sets university education apart is not efficiency but doubt, the cultivation of critical distance, of questioning one’s own knowledge and confronting one’s own prejudices. Recognizing human fallibility and making students sceptical of totalizing claims should be at the very heart of liberal education. In that sense, Linderoth’s instructionist paradigm risks feeding into the broader deintellectualization of higher education which I wrote about in my recent article on HyFlex teaching.

Iris Murdoch

Two years ago, Anna and I both became completely absorbed by Lyra Ekström Lindbäck’s novel Moral, in which the Irish-British novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch plays a key role. With Anna Victoria Hallberg’s book You Touch My Soul: Scenes from a Life with Iris Murdoch fresh off the printer, it felt like an obvious new piece to the puzzle – and a necessary investment.

Otherwise, the big news today is that my co-authored article Critical Perspectives on HyFlex Teaching is finally live on the website of the Journal of Social Work Education. First submitted in May 2023, back when I was still working in Umeå, it has been one of the most drawn-out publishing experiences of my career – rivalled only by my book chapter with Edward Elgar earlier this year. From initial submission to first decision, my co-author Linda and I waited 13 months. Fortunately, the reviewers were positive, so after some minor revisions our article was accepted in September last year. Normally, it then takes a few months for an article to appear online (and possibly much longer before it is assigned to an actual issue of the journal). In our case, however, we had to wait another ten months before the next chapter of the saga: getting the journal to recognize that Halmstad University (like all Swedish universities) has a “transformative agreement” with Taylor & Francis that covers the cost of open access publishing. Countless e-mails later, I got to sign the publishing agreement last Tuesday – and, after yet another exchange with the portfolio manager and the “typesetter” (only the “lamplighter” missing) – the article finally appeared online today exactly one week later. I like to think that Iris Murdoch would have appreciated the whole affair: the long wait, the bureaucratic entanglements, the small triumph at the end symbolized by fish tacos and a bottle of Portuguese white wine – all the stuff of moral life, just with more email threads and fewer Oxford quadrangles.

Sista sommarlovsdagen

Many summers ago, my dad took me and my sister on a trip to Böda Sand and northern Öland. It was the last Sunday before school would start, all ice cream was selling at half price, and the air carried a heavy sense of melancholy. I remember wanting to stretch out every moment, knowing that a long spell of freedom and uninterrupted time was coming to an end.

Luckily, my own kids are slightly more rational. Eddie has been away for four days at Kode Space Camp, while William decided to bake bread (sic!) entirely on his own as Anna and I went into town for some autumn wardrobe upgrades and, not to forget, a Basque cheesecake at A43.

Otherwise, the big thing around the corner is “kyrkflytten” in Kiruna (the moving of the town’s large wooden church) on Tuesday. Anna’s mother will fly up tomorrow morning to witness the spectacle firsthand, as the church – weighing 672 tonnes – is transported five kilometres in one piece, including its famous altarpiece by Prince Eugen. The painting, nearly five metres long and four metres high, was inspired by his trip to Florence in 1897. When in Kiruna during the winter months, the contrast to the outside world could not be more pronounced.