Hi Jill
I had a pleasant evening thinking on and off of Djurgården and Stockholm
in general. It stayed with me until this morning; but within minutes of
consciousness return the shipping forecast cleared my internal screen and
speaker for new thoughts. Dover, Wight, Portsmouth, Plymouth
Then I was too busy coping with the heating being on in the bus to revert.
(I complained and the driver told me that it's autumn. I said the weather
hasn't broken yet and he said they don't think like that.)
I wonder if Stockholm bus drivers are still largely from Jugoslavia-as was.
I've reread your poem, keeping my enthusiasm for the city in some check;
and I still think highly of it, the poem.
I was confused yesterday by your reference to bridges because I remembered
only one, crossing the little channel to the north, Djurgårdsbrunnsbron, or
something like ; and that seems to be the way it is; so now I think you
mean in that part of Stockholm generally.
It's over 20 years since I was there; so the enthusiasm is mental in at
least one way. At that stretch, memories are unreliable. Djurgården
features a little in the last Kurt Wallander novel by Henning Mankel. That
novel's helped to adjust my thoughts a little, quite apart from many I knew
being dead. A dark side of Sweden - Palme's assassination, paranoia re
USSR... I was coming back for the ferry just before Xmas 1991 when there
was a bomb explosion in Central Station. I was at the Djurgård town by
Gröna Lund and Skansen so there were people around. Everyone looked. I said
out loud that it was bomb; and, interestingly, someone said "No, this is
Sweden." I said I was a Londoner and I knew the sound of a bomb.
It turned out to be neo Nazis I believe.
The very interesting sound artist Ake Hodell used to live there on
Falkenbergsgatan as I remember. I went there the once.
He made a tape-based text-sound composition called Djurgård ferry over the
River Styx - Djurgårdsfärjan över floden Styx. Well worth a listen. It's on
the web.
I never went to Gröna Lund though I heard Status Quo playing there some
time in the 70s - heard them from Södermalm, where I tended to stay.
I remember Skansen, the zoo etc. My friend greeting a goat "hello smelly
goat" either in the 70s or the 90s, long ago anyway. And a lynx, visibly
crazy pacing backwards and forwards over its hill. A large hill but small
for a lynx, which needed a territory more like the size of the city. And 2
elephants side by side in a shed rocking in distress.
But then Djurgården is so called (Djur = animal) because it was earlier a
royal hunting territory
I doubt whether any of that is much use. I had better not write more. Save
perhaps that then and possibly now if you stand at the northern end of
Mosebacketorg and look out it is the scene described from the main
character's point of view at the start of Strindberg's Red Room as he looks
at Old Town and then east to Lidingö and out into the archipelago. To one
who grew up in a city newly-flattened by bombing that was interesting
Enough already, enough old man's memories.
Thank you for a fine poem
L
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