You blow hot and cold on the merits of being in business for yourself, but sometimes you go to a mid-week desert blues show with a Danish friend, and as a result have one or two beers more than you might usually have, and you get up an hour late the next day, mildly hungover and harangued by the cat, only to take the executive decision to write the day off entirely, mooch around in the art supplies store for a while, then go meet a couple of friends for a lunch of roast duck over rice at a little Chinese hole-in-the-wall just off Drottningstorget, and afterward meander your way homewards through town with nothing much approaching a plan, while you think to yourself “actually, this is the good life, right here”.

And as you meander, you pass that bookstore that you’ve somehow never got round to going into, except the evening you went there with another friend to hear some very old American psychoanalyst give a talk that no one could hear on a topic she couldn’t entirely articulate, and it turns out they are the sort of place that not only has the obligatory tables of super-cheap rubbish near the front, but also a chaotic blend of languages and topics and degrees of pre-lovedness mixed with a smattering of new stock, plus old magazines and battered antique oddities, much of which is literally just sat on the floor in paper bags—albeit quite neatly, because Sweden—and over half of which bears no marked price, presumably to be made up on the spot by the owner who is (naturally) away today, and suddenly the twenty minutes you thought you’d spend has turned into over an hour and a few hundred kronor, and as you try to tie a small pile of books to the parcel rack of your bike with the disintegrating shreds of a cheap plastic bag, you realise that you’re probably going to have to go back there, not just once but repeatedly, and likely on a weekly basis, because these sorts of shops are the coffee spoons in which you have measured away a fair amount of the last three decades and change, and of all your various vices, it’s maybe the one you’ll never be willing, let alone able, to quit.