Greetings from Stockholm (again).
My tale for you this week features a padded cell, a double dose of calamity, finding friendship and love while travelling solo, crying in the street, and being rained on by blossom. In short, it’s been quite a week!
And as always, I’ve been able to find a lesson or two that will hopefully be useful or resonate with you.
OK, so let’s start with the padded cell…
On Tuesday I arrived back in the UK from San Francisco for one night only before flying on to Stockholm.
To save time I booked myself into a hotel right by the airport - so right by the airport it was actually in the airport, which was quite a novel experience.
The hotel lobby was essentially a desk next to Departures, and to get to the rooms you had to swipe your key card in the lift to take you up to some secret floors at the top of the building, filled with seemingly endless corridors lined with doors.
I knew from when I booked it that the room had no window, which didn’t bother me in the slightest, as long as it had a bed, kettle and bathroom it was all good.
The room turned out to have a bed and a bathroom but no kettle - but that was ok as the guy on the desk had informed me that there was a ‘complementary coffee station’ on the seventh floor.
The room also randomly had padded walls with a large rectangle of white glass on one of them, lit up from behind, which I think was meant to be a pretend window.
I crashed out pretty early and as soon as I hit the little light bulb sign on the control panel by my bed I was plunged into complete darkness. And I mean complete. I couldn’t see a thing.
I woke up later with a jolt and had a moment of complete and utter disorientation.
Where the hell was I and why couldn’t I see anything?!
I flailed about in the dark, hitting at the control panel and an icy blast suddenly came gushing out of the ceiling. I’d accidentally found the air con but still no light!
I eventually fumbled my way to my phone and discovered to my shock that although it appeared to be deepest darkest midnight in my room, it was actually half past nine in the morning in the outside world.
Feeling jet lagged and disorientated I stumbled my way into the bathroom, where it looked as if there was no shower - until I fiddled with a button on the wall and cold water came pouring like rain out of the ceiling all over everything, including me.
By this point I was feeling a little on edge to say the least. It’s ok, I told myself, as soon as you’re dressed you can go up to the complementary coffee station. And coffee makes everything feel better.
So off I set for the seventh floor and the ‘complementary coffee station’, which turned out to be a cupboard with a coffee machine crammed inside it.
After the unsettling start to my day I decided to get not one but two (cardboard, lidded) cups of coffee to take back to my room. All was good until I got into the lift and realised that I needed to swipe my card to make it work.
That’s ok, I can just balance one cup on top of the other, I told myself.
So I balanced one cup on top of the other, and bent slightly to swipe my card - tipping the top cup all down my front.
I returned to my room yelping and cursing and spent the next half an hour washing my top and drying it with the hair-dryer.
It’s safe to say that when I finally went downstairs to Departures, I was feeling a little bit hot and bothered.
It’s ok, you just need to check in and check your case and then you can chill out while you wait for the flight, I told myself.
So I went to the machine, checked in, and printed my boarding pass.
Your baggage label is now printing, the screen on the machine told me. So I stood and waited, and waited, but no label appeared.
Thank you, the machine said.
But you haven’t given me my label, I thought, feeling my hot and botheredness on the rise yet again.
I went over to the airline desk and told a man what had happened.
‘You obviously didn’t add the bag when you were checking in,’ he said smugly.
‘Yes, I did,’ I replied through gritted teeth. ‘And the machine said it was printing the label but nothing came out.’
The man sent me to join a long queue to check my luggage in manually. When it finally got to my turn a man strode in front of me out of nowhere and took my place.
At this point I officially reached the ‘huffing and puffing’ stage of hot and bothered, sending passive aggressive evil stares into the back of his ignorant, queue-jumping head.
And by the time it was my turn I was really bemoaning my bad luck. But….
I was just about to hoist my case onto the conveyor belt when the woman asked me if I had any devices inside.
I told her there was a laptop and the woman told me I’d have to take it on board with me as part of my carry on.
Somehow I managed to cram the laptop into my bag, once again cursing my bad luck but…
Once I got through security (and discovered my flight was delayed by an hour, naturally) and sat down, it occurred to me that the machine not printing my label was actually very good luck indeed.
Because if it had printed I’d have loaded my case onto the conveyor belt myself without realising that the laptop wasn’t allowed inside.
Presumably at some stage it would have been discovered and confiscated, or even worse, the airline might have kept hold of the whole case.
And this made me think of all the times in my life when something has gone badly wrong but then in the fullness of time, I’ve come to see that if it hadn’t gone wrong, something wonderfully right wouldn’t have happened afterwards
Sometimes - oftentimes - bad luck is really good luck in disguise. And sometimes it can take months or even years to see that something bad, like losing a job or a relationship was actually an essential step in moving on to something even better.
I was lucky in the airport because I was able to see how my bad luck was actually good luck very quickly.
So, I got to Sweden, where I was going to visit someone I met on my travels a year and a half ago. Someone who has become really important to me.
We spent a lovely three days together - and then it was time to say goodbye.
I’m not good at goodbyes, not when I really care about the person and I know that it’s going to be a very long time before I see them again. I should really call these type of goodbyes ‘badbyes’ because I can make such a hash of them.
So when my friend asked me if I wanted him to walk me to the station I said, ‘No, no, I’ll be fine.’
But I wasn’t fine.
As soon as I got out of the apartment building I felt so sad and distracted I took a wrong turning and ended up getting lost.
Why didn’t you let him walk with you, you idiot, I silently berated myself. You could have had more time together.
The sun was beating down and I was laden down with luggage and I couldn’t seem to find my way back and all of a sudden the urge to cry was overwhelming.
I took my phone out to message my friend and saw that I had a message from him. ‘Are you OK? Did you find the station?’
‘I’m lost,’ I replied, and in that moment I felt lost in every sense of the word, and in every part of my being. And then the tears started rolling and I couldn’t get them to stop.
A woman who was walking her dog towards me gave me a concerned look and said something to me in Swedish.
‘I’m lost,’ I mumbled through my tears. ‘I’m trying to find the station.’
Thankfully, she set me back on the right track and I got to the station and up onto the platform.
I sat on a bench with my head in my hands, trying to pull myself back together again.
After a few minutes my train arrived. Just as I stood up to get on board I thought I heard someone calling my name but knew that I had to be mistaken.
So I clambered on, my heart as heavy as my suitcase, and just as the doors slid shut I saw a man in a baseball cap scrambling up the embankment on the other side of the fence next to the track.
In the couple of seconds before the train pulled out of the station I realised that it was my friend. Scrambling up the hill and yelling my name. Trying to turn my ‘badbye’ into the loveliest - and most dramatic - of goodbyes.
I sat down on the seat and checked my phone, which had been on silent.
‘Stay where you’re at,’ he’d messaged. ‘I’m coming to find you.’
And this time, when my eyes filled with tears, they came from a sweet, rather than bitter, sorrow.
I arrived in Stockholm and checked into my hotel, then dragged myself off to meet a new acquaintance for a coffee that I’d arranged before my day had taken such a dramatic downturn.
I’d only met this guy once before, when I was last in Stockholm and spontaneously went along to a local writing group.
We’d been sitting next to each other and connected over a shared love of travel.
He’d sent me a link to the cafe we were meeting in, and I trudged off following the blue arrow on google maps, part of me really not feeling in the mood, but another part grateful for the distraction.
I arrived still feeling a bit fragile, but my new acquaintance was great company and we ended up skipping right over the small talk and diving deep into conversations about life, spirituality, psychology and travelling.
After a couple of hours he asked if I fancied going on somewhere for dinner.
It was a no-brainer as I didn’t fancy going back to my hotel room to be trapped with my sadness, so I instantly said yes
As we left the cafe he told me he’d like to take me somewhere else first. ‘Somewhere really beautiful,’ he said.
We walked for about five or ten minutes and emerged into the most beautiful public garden, lined on either side by rows of blossom trees that had just come into bloom, forming stunning tunnels of pink.
We slowly meandered up one side and down the other, and as a breeze picked up, hundreds of pale pink petals began showering down upon us.
It was an absolutely breathtaking moment, and I was struck again by how quickly my fortunes had changed.
One minute, I was crying in the middle of the street feeling as if my heart was splintering, but then a couple of hours later swirls of cherry blossom were cascading down and all around me and a brand new friend.
Life can be so tough sometimes but there’s still so much beauty to be found.
I hope that this week brings you moments of beauty too and that any bad luck you experience is really good luck in disguise.
Siobhan
Whenever something bad happens to me or traffic holds me up, I do try to think that this may be meant to protect me from something worse. I am giving you virtual hugs right now, dear cousin.
You are wonderful! You keep putting yourself out there — and that is what brings richness into your life. We cannot hide from heartbreak or frustration while living on this earth, but through investing in experiences we find out who we really are and how our being out among others gives us the opportunity to spread whatever is within us — in your case, JOY — in the case of the queue-breaker, OUTRAGE [or whatever other negative emotions they can generate by their behavior].
You continue to find and illustrate to your readers that indeed, this world is filled with more kindness than meanness; more good than bad; more reasons to live openly than closed off from the world.
Thank you, thank you!