The birthday present itself was simple: it was clear that Särbon would receive Göran Greider’s new book, “Stugland – a story about Sweden”. It seemed to be a good comfort book when we are not traveling around Sweden, and most of the time we do not do it but just stay at home, or go back and forth to the workplace.
You can not see much of Sweden in that, I can say. Especially not me who usually sits with my nose in a book in public transport.
But we love to go around Sweden and look at all the red cabins we pass. Sometimes I think that Göran Greider is the missing link between me and Särbon: Särbon looks at all the cottages with longing in his eyes, notes exciting windows, nice outbuildings, interesting practical solutions and solid work. Personally, I usually think of working-class literature, poverty, the growth of social Sweden and how nice it must have been to be able to move to an apartment with electricity and running water.
Göran Greider thinks both ways, I think.
Red cottages are nice! But personally, I prefer municipal rental companies, because no matter how beautiful it is with a small red cottage, it requires maintenance and repairs and mousetraps and God knows everything.
The cottages, on the other hand, do excellently in book form, and so the package for special residents would be wrapped up. To my delight, the bookseller had red wrapping paper, and at home I found white string and knotted carefully: a red package with white knots.
I thought of course at Namn och Nytt’s flag competition which the then editor Nisse Larsson (Namn och Nytt editors is strikingly often called Nisse) organized in 1999 when the reader Jan Enqvist thought we had had the blue-yellow flag long enough. Nisse Larsson urged the readership to submit new flag proposals, whereupon those who usually obeyed and drowned the editorial staff in imaginative, crazy and very funny proposals.
Tomas Johansson’s ingenious contribution won, of course: a red flag with white knots in the corners, which was sewn up and hoisted in the flagpole outside DN’s entrance. We also hoisted the prize winner, though not in the flagpole (he looked scared anyway), and Nisse Larsson wrote about both hoisting and celebrations with the headline “Now the competition is over – there was one with a knot”.
Our blue-yellow flag is nice after all. But sometimes I wonder if we should not have switched to that red flag with white knots.
Read more kåserier by Lotta O, for example about how affected you can be by “Little house on the prairie”.