Spaghetti con cinghiale

After a week apart, Linnéa came up to Halmstad last night to help me pack all my books. As we slow-cooked wild boar ragù with soffritto over a bottle of Lat 42 from Rioja, I could not help feeling a sting of melancholy about leaving Hallandsgatan, but now the train is truly in motion, so to speak.

Waking up to grey skies, I spent all of today in front of the computer marking systematic literature reviews before forcing myself to the gym for ten kilometres of indoor rowing, two activities that felt strangely analogous. My only interruption was giving away my sofa to charity, and now I will spend the rest of the evening packing as much as possible. Meanwhile, down in Kristianstad, Linnéa is reading up on Cayenne in the Lonely Planet guide to South America: “it all feels like a forgotten European outpost grafted onto a remote corner of a palm-fringed coast, just ripe for a starring role in a Graham Greene novel”.