Latest news with #PippiLongstocking
Times
04-07-2025
- Times
This is officially Europe's best cycle path
Many, many years ago, when I was just starting out along the travel writing path, I secured a berth on MS Juno, which murmurs along Sweden's Gota Canal between Gothenburg and Stockholm. This luxurious period piece has the reputation of being the Orient Express of sweetwater cruising, with a big emphasis on gastronomy, and I remember spending a lot of time at the dining table tucking into the likes of reindeer and Arctic char. I remember, too, being bewitched by the world beyond the portholes. Sweden's pastoral backyard was a storybook landscape of gossamer morning mists, of wildflowered meadows, of little Pippi Longstocking summerhouses, where apple-cheeked blondes sang to their babies while their dungareed menfolk tried to keep a handbrake on spring. At the locks, dusky red-painted wooden cafés served coffee and homemade cinnamon buns, children draped each other in daisy chains and families readied their kayaks for adventure. It was all rather charming and wholesome. At the time, I remember gazing at this unravelling landscape rather wistfully, wishing that I could freeze-frame the boat trip for a day or so and get off, to get to grips with the waterside in a less passive, more hands-on kind of way. Well, fast forward a couple of decades or three and I am back again on the Gota Canal, this time doing exactly that, and with my own apple-cheeked other half. Moreover, it's not just personal wish-fulfilment, because the canal's towpath has recently been declared the European Cycle Route of the Year at Fiets en Wandelbeurs, an annual Dutch cycling and hiking fair. The whole Gota route stitches together several big lakes. We had a plan to cycle over three days from its start at Sjotorp on the eastern edge of Lake Vanern to Karlsborg on the western side of Lake Vattern, roughly midway. We would be covering an average of 20 miles a day on sturdy hybrid bikes provided by our guesthouse for the first two nights, an elegant former vicarage called Prastgarden in the canalside town of Toreboda. • Discover our full guide to Sweden The canal is one of a tradition of nation-crossing waterways, like the Kiel Canal in Germany and the Canal du Midi in France, and when it was completed in 1832 it immediately had strategic significance in getting valuable freight and military hardware from one side of the country to the other without having to pass under anyone else's guns. These days, however, it is entirely given over to recreation, and is a considerable source of national pride, not least because digging out its 120 miles was a huge endeavour, involving 58,000 soldiers and an awful lot of wheelbarrows. The crew included a tough band of Scots brought over by our very own Thomas Telford, creator of the Scotland-crossing Caledonian Canal, whose expertise was engaged by the canal's driving force, the Swedish naval officer Count Baltzar von Platen. All of this can be gleaned from multilingual signposts along the canal's bank, and in historic buildings dotted along its length. • Europe's best active escapes We had our first fika — coffee and a cinnamon bun — in an antique wooden warehouse by the harbourside in Sjotorp, where the canal proper begins on the eastern shore of Lake Vanern, and where the good folk from Prastgarden had deposited us with our bikes. There's a canal museum upstairs, but the downstairs Café Baltzar feels like a museum piece too, sitting under chandeliers at a lace-covered table overlooked by a portrait of the count himself ( Fortified by the count's buns, we set off on the towpath, enveloped by birdsong, and ticking off the ells. When the canal was built, the ell was a common unit of measurement, and not just for cloth. Numbered stones are placed along the canal every 1,000 ells, which equates to about 600 metres — an ideal distance to convince cyclists that they are going 'ell for leather. • The best of adventure travel The canal winds through a mix of woodlands and wheat fields, celebrated at regular intervals by salvos of lupins in blues, purples and pinks. There are freshly painted roll-across bridges and lock systems, usually with a cluster of onlookers gathering to exchange greetings with boats passing through. Here too are the little wooden houses with summerhouses I remembered, although no more men in dungarees: instead robomowers graze slowly across the lawns, looking like fat rabbits, but that's about the only concession to the passing of time. After about 16 miles of canalside cycling we got back to Toreboda, welcomed into the town by a long gallery of paintings along the water's edge, backed by a succession of designer bungalows whose gardens were open to the towpath. When I mentioned to the Prastgarden's co-owner Yvonne Branfelt how unfenced-off everything seemed, she said people didn't need to lock their doors in Toreboda. Apart from when word went round that one particular well-known bad apple was out of prison. Next day we were back on the towpath for a couple of hours before the canal debouched into a smaller intermediary lake, Viken. Here the cycle route veers away into farmland, forest and fields of wheat, tracking the lake's outline from a distance along a network of gravel roads. • The UK's best cycling trails Secreted among the woodlands were holiday cabins, some elaborate, some primitive, but every one a private paradise. One had a little self-serve kiosk selling mostly knitted goods, which answered my unspoken question: what do people do here in the winter? That day was a tougher 40 miles, and my apple-cheeked companion was getting a bit Granny Smith by the time we reached Forsvik, where the canal does a short sprint between lakes Viken and Vattern. Here the drop between the two — and the resulting waterpower — has been instrumental to the success of a long line of industries, starting back in the 1400s with a sawmill and flour mill, and moving on more recently to smithy and iron foundry, all on the same patch of lakeside. They needed a lot of manpower, those industries, and today the Vandrarhem worker's apartments, where we stayed that night, have been transformed into tourist accommodation, in a timewarp of old coal ranges and period furniture. Walking out from here among the ghosts of old factories felt like a walk through Sweden's social history. From Forsvik it was a relatively short ten-mile ride on our final day to Karlsborg, a settlement originally created as Sweden's reserve capital, inland and up the canal, in case coastal Stockholm came under attack. There we were planning a visit to its castle, before setting off back to Gothenburg for our flight home. That short morning's cycle was different again from the previous day, being mainly through a pine forest completely carpeted in bilberries. The low sun shone stroboscopically through the trees, silhouetting deer that stood motionless as we passed, but bolted when we stopped to take a picture. At Karlsborg, it seemed a bit premature to bring the trip to an end with plenty of canal remaining, but it was a natural break, with more ungainly shaped lakes to be circumvented ahead before the waterway proper began again. All in all it was a very wholesome three days, along a carefully curated route, in a fresh climate that was neither too hot nor too cold. My only disappointment was that we didn't meet my old friend Juno somewhere along the way; she was plying her trade two days ahead of us. So I look forward to draping her with daisy chains when we eventually return to the Gota, having saved the eastern half of the cycle route for another Eames was a guest of West Sweden ( and Visit Sweden ( The Prastgarden guesthouse has two nights' half-board from £484pp, including bike hire ( Fly to Gothenburg then take the train to Toreboda and Karlsborg (
Yahoo
06-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Voices: Let's end the performative hell of compulsory World Book Day costumes
Today, Thursday 6 March, millions of adults and children around the country will mark the annual horror that is World Book Day, celebrating books, authors, illustrators and the power of the written word, with a series of book-themed events... and costumes. Yes: each year, children show their love of reading by going to school dressed up as their favourite fictional character. World Book Day is important because it's also the day that parents around the country receive a text at 8.35am reminding them that they have in fact forgotten to make a World Book Day costume and now have seven minutes to demonstrate the power of the written word by texting swears to everyone they know on the group chat. What kind of parent, you might ask – what kind of anti-intellectual monster – would say that a kids'-book costume makes their book-loving soul leave their body? Well, brace yourselves, because I am that monster, and I hate to tell you this, but so is every parent I know – yes, even the nice ones. Obviously not ALL parents. I have huge love for those who really do enjoy crafting clever and joyful literary costumes for their children and always remember to do so. My only rule for raising children (apart from 'check if it's chocolate before you lick it') is 'just do what you like, babes'. This ancient mantra has steered me safely through every parenting choice. But what's always overlooked is that dressing up children either requires time or it requires money – and if you have a child who has an eye for negotiation then it's definitely going to require both. And inevitably, that cost is not felt equally by all parents. I'm a working parent of primary school-aged children, and I'm enormously fortunate. I only need one job to pay the bills, and I have a partner who will actually organise World Book Day while I just write about World Book Day. Yet still, every year I have a small meltdown about making costumes, then feel guilty about it afterwards. I've seen my own children move from happiness about dressing up as their favourite character, to a low-level hum of anxiety about having a shop-bought outfit, and one that has to be from a 'real book' rather than the cartoons they actually love reading. Watching my timelines fill up every year with the obligatory #WBD outfits, I can't shake the feeling that this part of the day is creepingly performative. Look, I'm not saying social media is fetishising the act of reading as a nostalgic, middle class pursuit regardless of the child's actual interests, but what I am saying is there are an awful lot of Pippi Longstocking outfits on Instagram. Maybe if we saw fewer pictures of finished costumes, and more of women (and it is mostly women) frantically hunting for sellotape in a 4pm Teams meeting with the camera off, then we might get a better idea of how many hurdles there are for those with caring responsibilities to access the arts themselves. What's better than reading? That's right, it's looking for teal face paint and a bow and arrow in Sainsbury's at 5.30pm, or rage-buying a dragon onesie off Amazon Prime at one in the morning. Let's not forget the year I made a mammoth out of a potato at 8pm on a Wednesday, with kebab stick limbs that kept falling off (book fact: that's how Ernest Hemingway wrote A Farewell To Arms). And at least I have the option to dash out and buy things because our family income places us above the poverty line. After a decade of austerity, a pandemic and now the cost of living squeeze, 31 per cent of children (or nine in a class of 30), live below it. These are the inequalities that World Book Day sets out to tackle, including with book tokens for every child. But something about frantically buying disposable merch at a time when 40 per cent of primary schools don't have library budgets, and a record 1.7 million children claim free school meals, feels like it goes against the spirit of the day. Let's ditch compulsory costumes. There are a million other ways for us to find joy in reading, and you can find just some of them here. Teachers already work tirelessly to make this a wonderful day for children, and they do it, as they do everything, in the face of chronic underfunding and obstructive policies. If we're going to imagine a future full of opportunities for all children, then we are going to have to imagine very hard. Books lie at the heart of that – children's books most of all. It's here that we learn the value of kindness, courage, the telling of difficult truths. What light, devastating sedition this is – no wonder I have the feeling it's being repackaged and sold back to us. If you have cash to spare on Thursday, give it to charities, schools, authors or parents in your communities – not supermarkets. And if you're worrying about getting a costume sorted, well you really don't have to. I don't want to get too literary, but just do what you like, babes.
The Independent
06-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Let's end the performative hell of compulsory World Book Day costumes
Today, Thursday 6 March, millions of adults and children around the country will mark the annual horror that is World Book Day, celebrating books, authors, illustrators and the power of the written word, with a series of book-themed events... and costumes. Yes: each year, children show their love of reading by going to school dressed up as their favourite fictional character. World Book Day is important because it's also the day that parents around the country receive a text at 8.35am reminding them that they have in fact forgotten to make a World Book Day costume and now have seven minutes to demonstrate the power of the written word by texting swears to everyone they know on the group chat. What kind of parent, you might ask – what kind of anti-intellectual monster – would say that a kids'-book costume makes their book-loving soul leave their body? Well, brace yourselves, because I am that monster, and I hate to tell you this, but so is every parent I know – yes, even the nice ones. Obviously not ALL parents. I have huge love for those who really do enjoy crafting clever and joyful literary costumes for their children and always remember to do so. My only rule for raising children (apart from 'check if it's chocolate before you lick it') is 'just do what you like, babes'. This ancient mantra has steered me safely through every parenting choice. But what's always overlooked is that dressing up children either requires time or it requires money – and if you have a child who has an eye for negotiation then it's definitely going to require both. And inevitably, that cost is not felt equally by all parents. I'm a working parent of primary school-aged children, and I'm enormously fortunate. I only need one job to pay the bills, and I have a partner who will actually organise World Book Day while I just write about World Book Day. Yet still, every year I have a small meltdown about making costumes, then feel guilty about it afterwards. I've seen my own children move from happiness about dressing up as their favourite character, to a low-level hum of anxiety about having a shop-bought outfit, and one that has to be from a 'real book' rather than the cartoons they actually love reading. Watching my timelines fill up every year with the obligatory #WBD outfits, I can't shake the feeling that this part of the day is creepingly performative. Look, I'm not saying social media is fetishising the act of reading as a nostalgic, middle class pursuit regardless of the child's actual interests, but what I am saying is there are an awful lot of Pippi Longstocking outfits on Instagram. Maybe if we saw fewer pictures of finished costumes, and more of women (and it is mostly women) frantically hunting for sellotape in a 4pm Teams meeting with the camera off, then we might get a better idea of how many hurdles there are for those with caring responsibilities to access the arts themselves. What's better than reading? That's right, it's looking for teal face paint and a bow and arrow in Sainsbury's at 5.30pm, or rage-buying a dragon onesie off Amazon Prime at one in the morning. Let's not forget the year I made a mammoth out of a potato at 8pm on a Wednesday, with kebab stick limbs that kept falling off (book fact: that's how Ernest Hemingway wrote A Farewell To Arms). And at least I have the option to dash out and buy things because our family income places us above the poverty line. After a decade of austerity, a pandemic and now the cost of living squeeze, 31 per cent of children (or nine in a class of 30), live below it. These are the inequalities that World Book Day sets out to tackle, including with book tokens for every child. But something about frantically buying disposable merch at a time when 40 per cent of primary schools don't have library budgets, and a record 1.7 million children claim free school meals, feels like it goes against the spirit of the day. Let's ditch compulsory costumes. There are a million other ways for us to find joy in reading, and you can find just some of them here. Teachers already work tirelessly to make this a wonderful day for children, and they do it, as they do everything, in the face of chronic underfunding and obstructive policies. If we're going to imagine a future full of opportunities for all children, then we are going to have to imagine very hard. Books lie at the heart of that – children's books most of all. It's here that we learn the value of kindness, courage, the telling of difficult truths. What light, devastating sedition this is – no wonder I have the feeling it's being repackaged and sold back to us. If you have cash to spare on Thursday, give it to charities, schools, authors or parents in your communities – not supermarkets. And if you're worrying about getting a costume sorted, well you really don't have to. I don't want to get too literary, but just do what you like, babes.
The Independent
03-03-2025
- The Independent
Sabotage attempt could have left entire Swedish holiday island without water
Police are investigating a case of attempted sabotage involving the water supply on a holiday island in the Baltic Sea off the coast of Sweden. The entire island of Gotland could have been left without water had the possible sabotage not been discovered, Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet Daily reported on Monday, citing anonymous sources. The area has been cordoned off and technicians are investigating. "We are aware of an incident that was reported yesterday but it is being handled by police," a Swedish Security Service spokesperson told Reuters. A police spokesperson declined to comment. Gotland is Sweden's largest island with a coastline spanning 800 kilometres. The Pippi Longstocking TV series was entirely filmed in the island's main town of Visby - which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The report comes just days after the suspected sabotage of an undersea telecoms cable was discovered just off Gotland. It is not suggested the incidents are related. Finnish operator Cinia said it had detected problems on its C-Lion1 fibre-optic link connecting Finland and Germany and later confirmed the cable was damaged even as data traffic continued to flow. Finland's National Bureau of Investigation said a preliminary investigation was launched. Swedish police are also investigating because the breach occurred in Sweden's economic zone. Sweden's Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said the government was being briefed and that damage to any undersea infrastructure was particularly concerning amid the current security situation. No suspects had been identified. Sweden's coast guard deployed a vessel to the area as multiple seabed cables have been damaged in recent months, however, some were ruled accidental. The Baltic Sea region in general is on alert after a series of power cable, telecom and gas pipeline outages since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. The European Commission said it would propose boosting surveillance of undersea cables and establishing a fleet of vessels available to carry out repairs in emergencies.
Boston Globe
19-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Lessons from the drive-through
'Yes, but not today.' Wednesday: 'How about now for that Wendy's? Some people like to dip their fries in the Frosty, and I think you would find that delicious.' 'That … does sound delicious. But not now.' Friday: 'What are we having for dinner? Because I was thinking tonight would be a good night for Wendy's so when you get home you don't have to cook anything.' Advertisement Oh, touché. And so I found myself at the drive-through, gazing up at a saucy lass with red braids and freckles, my favorite of the fast food icons since my own childhood. I loved Pippi Longstocking and thought of Wendy as the capitalist American analog, peddling burgers instead of being super-strong and living in a tree. That we had never ordered Wendy's before had zero to do with principle and everything to do with the proliferation of McDonald's. There are three times as many as there are Wendy's within 10 miles of our house. Seems like sister hit the grease ceiling. Get Winter Soup Club A six-week series featuring soup recipes and cozy vibes, plus side dishes and toppings, to get us all through the winter. Enter Email Sign Up A Wendy's chocolate Frosty. Courtesy of Wendy's I thought I'd be a hero, returning with the coveted chocolate Frosty, plus the dippable fries and some nuggets. Instead, I fell into an alternate universe. One minute you're texting mom jokes to your husband — 'Should I tell them to hold the Jerod Mayo?' — and the next the systems you take for granted have disintegrated like a wet tissue. The line of cars at the drive-through wrapped around the building. I joined the caravan and waited. Then I waited some more. The cars were not moving. All these suckers sitting here forgot they could just go in and order! I laughed, shaking my head. I parked in the lot, entered the Wendy's, and discovered a scene of pure chaos. Advertisement It was like the United Nations meets the stock exchange floor, but you wanted fries with that. A frenzy of people were yelling at one another in multiple languages. Employees and delivery drivers ran to and fro, on different sides of the counter. There was no food being produced that I could see. A stricken-looking woman turned to her co-worker and said, sotto voce, 'Babygirl, what is happening?' Babygirl, what is? I rejoined the drive-through line and waited some more. Should I download the app and order that way? Should I give up the Frosty dream? But here was some progress. My car inched forward. I finally rolled down my window to place my order. Silence. 'Hello? Are you ready?' One more beat of silence, then through the speaker came a great sigh, a sigh of world-weariness that dealt a womp-womp to my very soul. And a voice spoke: 'It's gonna be a long night. Would you mind waiting a few minutes?' 'I'm so sorry,' I said. Then I drove to McDonald's, located in the next lot over. A teenager took my order. He sounded as enthusiastic as a teenager working nights at the McDonald's drive-through window probably feels. As I waited in the bardo between order and pickup, a man pulled in behind me. Our windows were down, and I heard him light into the kid: 'What is your problem?' he raged. 'You're in customer service! Where is your enthusiasm? What the hell are you doing? You don't belong here. Maybe you should try taking Adderall!' I received my hot bag of grease, my cold cups of bubbles and ice. Then I peeled out and swerved back around, suddenly possessed with the dexterity of a race car driver. I screeched up to the order window and braked. A sullen teen voice asked, 'Can I help you?' Advertisement 'Yes. I just wanted to say that guy was a total jerk.' 'You heard him?' The kid sounded so relieved. 'I heard him. It's his problem, not yours. You're doing fine. Don't let him get to you.' 'Thank you so much,' said the kid, who was hired to take our orders but doesn't owe us jazz hands in the bargain. I never got that Frosty. I thought I was running an errand for my own child. It turned out to be for someone else's instead. I hope if someone ever speaks to my son that way, a bystander will do the same. I'll never know what malign spirit possessed Wendy's that night, what gremlins got into the wires. It doesn't take much to dismantle the systems we take for granted. But there are still humans inside the building. 'Babygirl, what is happening?' 'It's gonna be a long night.' With a little grace, may they sort it out. Devra First can be reached at
