The Real Flex

While my dad headed up to Norway for the launch of Snälltåget’s new daytime service between Oslo and Malmö, I took the train in the opposite direction to Halmstad to show my mother around campus as well as my apartment on Hallandsgatan 19, which I was pleased to see met with her approval.

Beyond showcasing Halland, we have also been able to go for a morning run together, which I always find inspiring. It is one thing to run an ultra-marathon at 47, but the real flex is obviously to run up and down the hills of Skatås at 77.

The Return of the Marking Dead

Just when I thought that the semester was over and all marking had been completed, I received 54 IR exams out of the blue with a rapidly approaching deadline. Luckily, thanks to my long-established double identity as Examinator Rex Magnificus, I was able to work my way through the whole batch.

Otherwise, I woke up on the 14th floor of Jacy’s hotel in Gårda after Anna and I had spent the night there enjoying a sumptuous 11-dish dinner and spa package prior to her early morning train to Västerås. With my parents being here in Gothenburg for a few days, the sofa was not big enough for the two of us, so a staycation was really the best way to justify an extravagant dinner in the name of household logistics.

Back at Jacy's

Aerobic volume

With nineteen days remaining until my 132-kilometre ultra in the UK, I am all in on aerobic volume, trying to keep my heart rate down and get the kilometres in. Starting at half past five, I ran a half marathon while the rest of the house was still sleeping, bringing my weekly mileage above 80 kilometres for the third consecutive week.

Afterwards, I went back up to Delsjön with my parents and William for a swim. With a water temperature of 17 degrees, I could definitely tell that I was not in Campania anymore, but it was incredibly refreshing. As for Campania, I made tuna steaks for lunch with caramelized onion and my signature salad with kale and mango.

Interrailing from above

Crossing the Apennines, snow is still visible on the higher peaks. Europe truly is our playground and, just like last night, I get that feeling of open-ended adventure: that somehow the story is far from over.

Yet, finishing the last pages of David Szalay’s Flesh, I am struck by an acute sense of physical vulnerability, a reminder of how quickly things can change, like when Anna fell on that cliff back in 2023. Though his life is so different from my own, following István around Europe has meant coming back to many places that I know, and to all their contingencies and memories. As much as I keep telling myself that I have more agency in my own life, the tiny and seemingly insignificant circumstances do have a tendency to add up over time. Looking down as we enter German airspace, I can almost see the trains criss-crossing below, like an Interrail pass holder still not knowing if the night will end in Brussels, Cologne or somewhere else entirely.

Arancia rossa

Waking up to another day of Italian sunshine, a slight hangover from last night made me trade my planned morning run for an early bus ride out to the airport. After a couple of coffees and some blood orange juice in the lounge, life is slowly returning to normal, and I can finally sum up the last few days.

Contrary to my fears on the flight down, everything went well in the end, and I have made a number of new acquaintances. Inspired by the success of the workshop, we are now planning a special issue that seeks to bring perspectives based on sufficiency and abundance into productive conversation. We are also hoping to organize another workshop in Ravenna sometime next year.

Meanwhile, back in Sweden, I have been asked to plan a new course on AI and public administration, something that I suspect could be of interest to many these days. With two more weeks of work remaining before the summer, I should be able to submit the article I have been writing on the transition to higher education and make sure that all my EU lectures for the autumn are planned and ready before August rolls around.

Friareielli

To reveal my absolute ignorance, “friarielli” has been the biggest culinary discovery of this trip. While I may well have encountered rapini in China in the past, this was the first time I tried the Neapolitan classic salsiccia e friarielli. Always weak for cabbage-like greens – for which I fully blame Gabriel and his Polish cooking – I found it an absolute treat: bold, bitter, and deeply savoury.

Sharing a bottle of Campanian red wine with my newfound Serbian friend and historian Damjan, I had one of those evenings that remind me why I would never want another job, and why I still find the world endlessly fascinating.

The abstract and the concrete

One criticism of my environmental philosophy work, to which I am largely sympathetic, is that it is too much about grand theory and too little about real lived experiences.

Wrapping up our two-day workshop at the Scuola Superiore Meridionale, the contrast could not have been sharper as my talk followed directly after a German PhD student had presented her work on “Fast Techno-Fixes, Slow Repair: Reparative Abundance Beyond the Labour–Climate Divide in Sicily’s Petrochemical Corridor”. Being a site of obvious environmental trauma, Sicily's petrochemical corridor seemed a long way from my vision of a bright ecomodern future (echoing the piece I wrote on conflicting temporalities back in 2020).

While it is easy to see the value of bottom-up approaches, one still has to recognize that they are inherently conservative. Imagine someone going to 19th century Sweden studying smallhold farmers. The intuition of most present-day social scientists would have been to find ways of making poverty slightly more bearable. In reality, mass migration to the United States and large-scale urbanization followed, paving the way for the industrial society that has allowed me to start this morning with a lovely run and a swim in the Mediterranean, completely emancipated from the serf-like conditions that existed back then. 

I guess what I am trying to say is that, sometimes, it is also important to remember the bigger perspectives, and recognize that change – which is often painful in the present – may be absolutely essential in the long run.

Sprada

Lungomare

From Bali to Beirut, few things beat a morning run and having the city to yourself before everyone else wakes up. Flying along the waterfront in my Hoka Bondis that I managed to pick up from Sellpy for close to nothing, I stop for coffee and a chocolate croissant that would make any Starbucks breakfast blush.

Now back at the hotel, I look through my pictures as I down a 1.5 litre bottle of water. With the temperature expected to climb up to 30 degrees today, I am both looking forward to and not looking forward to spending the day indoors at the Scuola Superiore Meridionale.