I've been discovering the Swedish way of doing things, as I've spent the last two days in Stockholm. It all seems so civilised (as many European cities do) when compared to London's inadequacies.

The view from the plane was beautiful, with the islands in the archipelago surrounded on all sides not by water, but by ice. It was a fantastic clear day, and still enough to not really notice the cold.

The trains run on time, the pubs stay open till 1am, and most things are noticeably cheaper.
I did make a mistake however of staying in the pub till closing time, forgetting that Sweden is one hour ahead of the UK, and wondered why I felt as tired as I did when I woke up this morning. I managed to work out how to set the alarm on the TV before going to bed, not convinced that it would work, but sure enough, at 7:30am the TV switched itself on, presenting a picture of an alarm clock and making a LOUD horrible alarm-type noise. It was then that I realised that I had no idea where the remote-control was, and there was no such thing as a snooze button (not that I could figure anayway, in my very bleary-eyed state).

After last night getting introduced to the pub-going side of drinking in Sweden, today I found out about the wholesale side.
Adam, one of the guys we're wokring with over here, showed us through the local "Systembolaget". This government-run chain of bottle-shops is the only place possible to buy wholesale alcohol in Sweden, and is an ingenious way of allowing the government to make money twice from the sale of each bottle - once in the form of the tax on alcohol, and again in the form of profit on each sale. The range in the shop that we saw was pretty extensive, with plenty of the local Absolut as well as beer, wine and spirits from all over Europe.

Tonight I think will be a bit of a quieter night - the last three night's sleep have been shorter than normal for various reasons.

Saturday afternoon spent roaming round the Science Museum.

I've felt a bit guilty of late for not having had a proper look at many of London's museums, so what better to do on a wet winter's day than stroll down to South Ken? Turns out that many kids and their attendant parents had exactly the same idea, so there was a fair amount of scrummaging and subtle body placement going on in order to see some of the exhibits.

I had grand ideas of seeing everything that I hadn't on the one previous time I'd been there, but it wasn't too be - in the end I only got as far as checking out the ground floor, including the new Wellcome wing which Kate has told me all about.

As happened on the one previous time I'd been there, I spent quite a bit of time checking out the section on rockets - lots of various rocket/space parephenalia, including a giant V2.
Some of the old film footage was funny - one piece show a little grapefuit-shaped rocket being lit by the rocketeers, who then ran furiously them other way, while the rocket itself plopped out of its cradle in a small short arc and landed about two feet away. And this was apparently very historic, as it was the first European launch of a liquid-fuel rocket - hmm.
It seems to be a typical story - a number of people in different parts of the world developing similar inventions, like Goddard.

The bit of the Wellcome wing that I saw was full of futuristic-type displays, and lots of video touch screens full of grubby fingerprints (I did add one or two of my own).
The lighting was very horribly fluroescent though, and made all the parents sitting in the adjoining cafe look even more haggard and tired than they probably were.

I think I'll have to make a return visit to see what I missed, probably starting much earlier on the day.

After the museum, I met up with Kate and went down to Streatham for dinner with two of her friends, Linda and Avril, and spent a fair amount of the night chatting with Avril's boyfriend Tom about boy-type things (cars, engines etc). He showed us some photos of a bizarre incident with his car, where they'd parked outside Brixton's Fridge and returned to find the pavement littered with clothes, books, stoves, paint, kitchen appliances - apparently someone in the flat above lost the plot totally and threw everything in the flat out the window, and onto the street below. According to the bystanders it was a bizarre scene - Tom's car ended up with various dents and a smashed windscreen.

Today was spent largely at Jackson's Lane, listening to a great Jazz trio and catching up with Adrian. Very nice, and worth the wait for a seat, talking about how, playing sax, you're forced to practice in the wardrobe to prevent the neighbours coming round.

Some buggers have all the luck.

Been a busy day - decided the best way to deal with this blog is to leave it at blogspot, and pay US$12 to remove the ad - this seems a lot cheaper than moving it to a paid web-server. The free webspace that my ISP provides is very nice, but unfortunately they only allow FTP access if you're currently dialled up using them as an ISP, ergo Blogger cannot update my web-site automatically (see below).
If you've read this far - congratulations!, as this has to be one of the most boring paragraphs I have read/heard/participated in today.

Tomorrow's Friday (yay).

Just been having a look at some other web-logs - there's one I really like by meg pritchard (providing, as it did, some of the inspiration for the layout of this site) and I noticed that she's sub-let part of her web-site out to her sister, who has some funny observations such as how hand-puppets can defuse situations of religious conflict!

Currently listening to Ryan (on, not Brian) Adams' Heartbreaker - great album, and like many of the best it's full of love-gone-wrong songs.

Kate was off to see the Beta Band last night - she got a call at the last moment from James who had a spare ticket, which was nice as she'd been tossing up whether or not to go - she's much more of a fan than me. Said that apparently the concert was much better than their one the previous night, when everyone was commanded to come along dressed-up to suit the Star Wars theme (!?).

Managed to put up some pictures of our Austrian experience over Christmas - a great time with lots of snow, few bruises (I can't speak for Kate, though) and some great company. Now, how long before the next opportunity to hit the slopes...?

OK.

I managed to get this blog working. It all should have been so simple, but as always there was a little glitch.
In this case, my ISP (Virgin.Net), although quite good with its service, doesn't allow me to FTP to my account on their server, unless I do this while using their dial-up service.

Normally, this is not a problem, as I FTP to my account from home using Virgin.Nets dial-up service, but using Blogger means that Blogger tries to FTP to my account without using the Virgin.Net dial-up service, and gets summarilly booted out with a cryptic "503" error.

So, for the time being I guess I'll have to use Blogger's Blogspot service - not bad at all except for the banner ad (which of course I could always remove by paying $12).

Monday morning - if I had my way, Friday mornings would be used to start off the week!