The Early Days of a Better Nation

Posted 9:49 pm by Ken

Wish you were here

It’s been six months. Raw grief fades, and often flares. I miss Carol more than ever. Absence doesn’t go away.

We used to take photos of our shadows: shadow selfies. ‘Smile!’ the one taking the photo would say, and we’d laugh.

This post is here to fill space. Skip it if you like. After it the blog will get back to its usual intermittent rambling about trivia, politics, science fiction, science, and materialism. I don’t want to click on it to check something, and be thrown back to the funeral. I have that photo of Carol framed in my living-room. This post is here to be a buffer, a shock absorber.

I’ve been getting on with things. I have family, and I have friends, and they’ve helped. There’s a book to write, which is coming together like a shape emerging from fog. There have been other projects. I had engagements, which I left too late to break. The first was a few days after Carol’s funeral, at the Seahorse Bookstore in Ardrossan. It was good to get out, and the owners and staff were lovely. One of my sisters and her husband, who live locally, came along. It was a good event, on a day of long bus rides. The worst pang was the bus back from Largs to Gourock, a short journey I’d often made with Carol.

Back in January, I’d got an invitation to the Gothenburg Book Fair. Carol and I had been to Sweden before, in August 2003. That was when we first met Alastair Reynolds and his wife Josette, and we’d been friends ever since. We’d explored Uppsala and Stockholm and its archipelago, met some of the SF-Bokhandeln people, and had a great time. And I’d been back since, this time on my own and to Gothenburg, in what was for me a busy and fraught year, 2015, for FSCONS.

So of course I asked Carol if she wanted to come with me, and of course she did. We paid her fare, and the Book Fair took care of everything else. They even put us up in the hotel for an extra couple of nights.

The flight was at 06:10 on Wednesday 25 September. I considered booking a taxi for 03:00, and decided to get a train and bus to the airport on Tuesday evening. It felt very strange to be locking the door for a trip and not having Carol going down the stairs ahead of me. I walked along to Cleats, where I had a half pint with the local SF crew, and on to the station. At Glasgow Airport I found a corner seat in Greggs, and read and dozed until it was time to join the queue. Apart from a two-hour delay in Amsterdam, the fight was uneventful. I was met by a taxi at the airport, and taken to Gothia Towers Hotel, adjacent to the venue, an enormous exhibition centre.

Erik Eje Almqvist met me in the lobby, treated me to a beer and lunch in the restaurant, and got me my guest badge and packet. The main theme of the Book Fair was Sápmi, the homeland of the Sámi people. A second theme was space. Quite a number of people in the corridors wore brightly coloured and embroidered Sámi clothing.

The room was splendid and had a spectacular view.

I had a nap, freshened up, and took the lift to the opening party. There the view was even more spectacular and even more people wore Sámi clothing. Everyone was speaking Swedish, but Erik spotted me and steered me into a conversation with a Lutheran clergywoman, so I had someone to chat with over my first glass. Later I had a couple of beers with Glenn Petersen of SF-Bokhandeln. A band played something that was meant to evoke space or cyberpunk, and Johan Stanberg McGuinne performed a joik. I was struck by some resemblances to Gaelic singing and the cadences of Highland heightened speech in preaching and poetry. Afterwards, I raised this rather tentatively with Johan, who surprised me by agreeing. Of Gaelic and Sámi heritage himself, Johan pointed out that these two cultures were unlikely to have influenced each other. An agreeable puzzle.

Thursday was one of my extra days, so after breakfast I picked up a Gothenburg tourist booklet in the hotel lobby and set off on the kind of local wander that Carol and I would have done. This included an amphibious bus tour, a late lunch of a massively filled sandwich at the food market, and a stroll through the botanic garden, which ended in me sitting on a bench and being acutely aware that Carol wasn’t beside me.

I walked back to the hotel just as the rain was starting, and had a look around the book fair, which was spread across four large and crowded halls.

The following days, these halls were packed. Every day, tens of thousands of people turned up. Every publisher and, it seemed, every reader in Sweden was there. I may write more about it sometime. I had a good time, I met new people, and I met up with Alastair Reynolds, Paul McAuley and Peter Hamilton, and we had breakfasts and beers. On the last day Glenn Petersen and his wife Ylva took us and their colleagues out for dinner at a Michelin starred restaurant. I asked Ylva if she could recommend somewhere to go on Sunday, the last of the free days we’d booked, and she suggested Marstrand Island. What I wanted to do, again, was take the sort of sight-seeing trip that Carol and I would have taken if she’d been there. This sounded exactly right.

It was. The bus rides were long, but the scenery was amazing, and every bus was on time. Marstrand Island is a five-minute ferry crossing from the terminus. Its main feature is a naval fortress, which unlike many such around the world has seen action.

Going around it was a pang. In 2023, Carol and I had explored a much larger naval fortress, at Pula in Croatia. Much larger, yes, but the layout has its own logic, and every corner had a sharp memory rising unbidden around it.

The views were great. Carol would have enjoyed it, if she'd been there.

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