Now

I'm on parental leave at the moment. Work has receded accordingly. It consists of checking the email extremely sporadically to see if there are any interesting social events happening at the office to find any errant messages that are someone else's problem for a time. Still, very much looking forward to seeing Strömmingen, the big residential project in Täby that I've worked on for a couple of years, coming up out of a hole in the ground in the very near future. I've left it in good hands.

I'm also keeping up a bit with the workplace union since I'm into my third straight year as an elected union representative, a trust and an honor I'm very proud of.

• The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw.

I've never really read horror, even less so body horror. Now I want seconds. It is a fairy tale to learn from. How to tie yourself to the mast of your chosen theme, and not deviate, not even slightly. Even if the story would have been more palatable and less chewy if you did. A monstrous fish from the deep, turned human slave and wife, forced to breed. A book about nurture and nourishment. I've seen many despise the book for its language. For being a short read at around a century of pages, it is as dense as sinew. But this is not about the melody, it is about the texture. You might well think you need a thesaurus to get through this, even if you are a native English speaker, but the words are not chosen to show off skill. They are chosen to enforce the theme at the cost of clarity. It's all about the tapestry and you don't need to pin down everything. Don't stop and think, indulge. I found myself looking up only the words that enticed me. That made me hungry for more.

Ships? Food? Embroidery? My mixed metaphors. If only I could keep a theme as well as Cassandra Khaw. Oh, and everyone just eats each other. A lot.

"I'd slice my larynx clean, make soup of the ribbons. I'd peel every word from my vocabulary."

Since I'm (still) weaning myself off social media, I promised to make myself a space of my own on the Internet, where I can share my thoughts on my own terms. So this page is a personal priority of mine.

Other than that, I'm mostly rediscovering and improving on old routines from my previous parental leave. It's an amazing boon to be able to do this. Sure, it's hard work in its own way, but it leaves me far more cognitive energy in the evenings, which I'll try to spend thoughtfully on a couple of tiny projects over the coming year. (And I really mean tiny. I've done this before. I know my limits.)