Tongue Tied

​Apart from having an absolute rubbish memory, one of the hardest things for me learning Swedish is that unlike French, the spoken Swedish language often sounds nothing like the written word suggests.

For example the Swedish for goodbye is written as ‘hejdå‘.

 When read with the English grammar and letter sounds that I have used all of my life, this suggests the word is pronounced ‘hedge dah’, but it actually sounds more like ‘hey door”.

Another is ‘hur mär du?‘

This is ‘how are you?’

Sure, you’d think ‘how are you’ = ‘her mar do’… but no, it’s more like ‘hur more ah’. 

Ett mä... to feel.

Looks like ‘et mah’ but is pronounced more like ‘or more’.

Lots of rolled ‘r’ sounds too.

I’m making some progress…

Finding Traction

Things have been moving slowly over the past year. Various obstacles cropped up or just increased in scale, causing delays and grief. 

A little progress was made as Frank the Tank, the classic Series 3 Land Rover got his engine back in and lives again. This is a good thing as Frank will be driven by Chris as the cat transporter.

 Meanwhile I’ll be in Rosie, an old Nissan Navara, with the back kitted out for the dogs. The ferries won’t allow dogs and cats in the same car, so both trucks are now arks. 

More developments come in the form of council planning permission. Yes, due to the weird rules where we live we can’t have a cargo container or lorry parked in the back garden. This means we have had to rethink the transportation needed to move our belongings. We really wanted a cargo container in the back garden so we could pack it up and then decorate the house as and when rooms were emptied. As it is, we now need a storage depot to put our stuff in to allow the house decorating to be done, which has narrowed down our shipping options to either a shipping company with a big removals truck, or a shipping company that can take a cargo container.

Ideally a cargo container will be used because it can then be unloaded at our new home in our own time. A removal truck would give limited time to sort ourselves out. The container could then become a shed or workshop etc.

Costings are underway but might have some tweaks due to the impending and ever increasing likelihood of Britain leaving the EU. A crazy idea, but not one I’m about to go into in this blog. 

The Brexit vote does mean things could mess up badly for the move, although we can still put certain plans in action whilst waiting until October for parliaments final decision. Maybe they’d even have formulated a plan by then…