A short update before the storm

Here in Sweden Midsummer is an important holiday and I spent it in Dalarna, the region of Sweden that I am from and also a region famous for its Midsummer celebrations that are very much according to all traditions. (I am not going to go into details about all the different types of celebrations but let us say that some of them involve large amounts of alcohol.)
What I enjoy with Midsummer is the sense of coming home, seeing people that you haven't seen in a very long time. And although I worked two of the days that I spent in Dalarna it felt very much as a holiday.
I even had plenty of time to reminiscence about when I lived in Dalarna. I found one train of thought particular interesting. I was walking by “Dalarnas regemente” that is the old army barracks in Falun. When I was living in the city we still had general conscription in Swede and the area was maybe not heavily guarded, but had barbed wire surrounding it and armed military guards at the entrances.
The thing is that I was heading for a place on the other side of the barracks and started to walk around it. But the entire barrack area have changed since Sweden changed to a having a professional army. It is now a business park with a lot of different companies. There are no armed guards, no barbed wire, not even a fence. Still I had begun to walk around the area.
I stopped and turned around, I had no reason to take the long way around, it was just out of habit that I started out on the usual way. But I actually had to stop and think about if I wanted to walk through the barracks area, it didn't feel right.
It is not that I had not been inside before. During my High School days I actually got inside once a week. My name was written down in a folder at the guard station among other people that practised fencing at the old gymnasium. Once I started my military service we were told that you could not get time of for participating in athletic events like football matches or things like that, but there were of course exceptions for certain sports with a more military flavour. So being a fencer had its privileges.
Maybe it was my experience of the area as an off limit and secure area that made it somewhat difficult to imagine that it could be possible to http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifjust cross it to get to the other side. In this case my reasoning faculties won fairly easily over my emotional response and I crossed the old barracks-yard, walked passed the old gymnasium where we practised fencing so many years ago. It was a long time ago I was there the last time, it is perhaps our memories of times gone by that makes us feel old, but I found no discomfort in remembering. I just found my reaction to the change of reality compared to my memories very revealing.

But what about the storm? Later today (after I have slept a bit) I will be performing for the conference “Strings 2011” at Uppsala castle, and the next month is extremely busy with a lot of things to do, in fact there are only three days I don't have plans for up to and including the first week of August. If I find the time that might imply some interesting posts on this blog.