England feels far away. A week after leaving Rye my thoughts are turning to the words of John Lennon’s Happy Christmas (War is Over)…

So this is Sweden
And what have I done
Another week older
And a new one just begun.

Well one thing I have done is to slip behind on my daily blogs...ws 185 for Tuesday 4th July was posted to the blogsite only this morning. I thought I had it under control. Slippage was intentional.

Upon moving to Sweden I decided to take a Here I am in a Foreign Land approach. But I felt the need of a few days of settling in before writing my Letter From Sweden. To avoid falling behind I placed blogstuff for each day on file…Here is One I Prepared Earlier sort of thing. Not a good idea. First I canned Monday’s blogstuff and wrote about Almadalen and Ségolène Royal. The next day I canned Tuesday’s blogstuff to write about Linné af Uppsala…and it has gone on like that all week. But worse was to come. Blogstuff on file meant my Post-it Pad Tracking System was redundant. Right? Wrong. A Digital Blog Diary has now been inaugurated to keep my daily record. Post-it Pads are forthwith obsolete. Did Alistair Cooke have these problems?

Laurie Lee the author of Cider with Rosie used to write from ten in the morning to half past four in the afternoon without a break...and divide his time between Slad in Gloucestershire and Chelsea in London. J.B. Priestley, H.G. Wells, P.G. Wodehouse found the need to set rules and introduce discipline into their writing lives. Priestley liked regular meals and an afternoon walk when on the Isle of Wight for instance. Wells left England for several months each year to write a new book. Walking the dog was an important part of Wodehouse’s daily routine in Le Touquet.

These writers also had women close to them who understood their Mode of Production and were content in their own lives. But I doubt this is a gender thing…more likely a writer’s thing. Jane Austen, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Mary McCarthy, Ursula Le Guin, J.K. Rowling…the presence in the background of their daily working life of a sympathetic partner to acknowledge and nurture the writer and the writ was probably important for them too.

Mary McCarthy (1912-1989)…another good thing to come out of Seattle…made her fame with The Group before writing The Company She Keeps. Her second marriage was to a working writer…the American critic Edmund Wilson. Her reputation is on the up now men and women who write are being judged on their writing. A writer’s needs are more complex than those implied by the image of the starving poet scribbling away in his frozen garret might imply.

Those who have only ever written under duress or necessity rarely understand the writer’s need to write. George Orwell’s essay Why I Write is worth consulting…Colin Wilson’s Outsider and Arthur’s Koestler’s Act of Creation are also attempts by writers to explain. The best writers may also be adaptable with an ability to produce their work under almost any circumstances. For Tom Paine and Alexander Solzhenitsyn it was hardly a life of Reilly never knowing if today was to be their last as they rotted away in the Bastille and the Siberian Gulags respectively. Solzhenitsyn is even quoted as saying ‘a man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy and nothing can stop him’.

I move around more than most…although Hans Christian Anderson drifted between benefactors…so I prefer a minimum of six weeks in one place…and 12-18 weeks is ideal. After this I hit my 26-week ceiling and lose enthusiasm. I pencil in two weeks of work disruption with a 50% fall in productivity when I move. My first week is for tying up loose ends from whence I came and setting up the infrastructure for whither I am headed.

By the end of the second week I expect productivity to be back to normal. Organising a new bank card, setting up my Swedish online banking, getting a Sundbyberg Library Card and an SL Season Ticket…anywhere in Stockholm County for ₤1.50 per day…are all first week errands. Next week it is Residence Permit Application and an apartment in Lund or Cambridge for the winter but these are not part of the normal moving routines. By next Saturday I hope to be up to speed with blog backlog eliminated and remedial website work completed. This gives me a clear week for William Franklin and IG-Index and another clear week to immerse myself in the idea of Fawlty Laptops.

In 175 days my blogyear will be at an end. Nights are drawing in. So I will sign off this blog with the lyrics of Happy Christmas (War is Over)…ain’t search engines wunderbarful?

So this is Christmas
And what have you done
Another year over
And a new one just begun

And so this is Christmas
I hope you have fun
The near and the dear one
The old and the young

A very merry Christmas
And a happy New Year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear

And so this is Christmas
For weak and for strong
For rich and the poor ones
The world is so wrong

And so happy Christmas
For black and for white
For yellow and red ones
Let's stop all the fight

A very merry Christmas
And a happy New Year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear

And so this is Christmas
And what have we done
Another year over
And a new one just begun

And so this is Christmas
I hope you have fun
The near and the dear one
The old and the young

A very merry Christmas
And a happy New Year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear

War is over
If you want it
War is over
Now

...music & lyrics by John Lennon (1940-1980).