Cabin life in Darlana

This morning I woke up by being “head butted”…..

Something that came along with the job in Falun was the opportunity to stay in a 17th century log cottage on the farm of Anna – one of my colleagues – and her husband.

What I had not been told, was that there were three other tenants : Yoda, Swerre and Bamse – the farm cats – who turned out to be very social and who frequently tried to occupy the most comfortable seats in the house, the bench in the kitchen or my bed….

Thankfully the headbutting issue was quickly resolved by letting the culprit go outside. It wasn’t helped though that it was 6 am and -5C and it didn’t feel much warmer inside the cottage…..

Nevertheless, the place was absolutely perfect for me and I loved it from the first moment: two rooms – a kitchen with a large fridge and a couple of bunk beds and a living room with another two beds offered enough space for myself, for all the stuff I had taken with me in my long suffering car and for the three felines. There was also a bathroom with well working underfloor heating and a utility room with a washing machine and a tumble dryer.

The place is circa 10 km away from the clinic, in the middle of the nowhere, surrounded by forest and fields, with grazing horses and the occasional elg (ok, I haven’t seen one yet, but I have been told that they are out there…..)

Vital tasks to learn were to chip wood in the correct way with a special blade to light a fire in the tiled fire place without using any paper and to turn on the timer first, when trying to warm up food on the heating plates – failing to do this, resulted a few times in a freezing bedroom or in a cold supper or in both.

Close to the cottage in a disused railway line (with the tracks and sleepers removed), which makes a nice and flat running track when I am coming home from work, which is always at night (which starts here at 3.30 pm).

Completing my humble abbot is a well stocked library, containing a nice selection of the works of Agnes von Krusenstjerna, Selma Lagerloef and August Strindberg and many more of the Swedish classics, but unfortunately all in Swedish……

However – how simple can a piece of paradise be?…….