Things we did manage to buy in Stockholm

there's not a lot because we are past the stage of needing a souvenir of the city itself. We did however go to a new(to us) Art Gallery, of which more another day, and there I bought a new jigsaw puzzle 

and a poster 

A poster is a stupid thing to buy to bring back from holiday really unless the place you buy it from offers it in a protective cardboard tube which this one didn't. The girl behind the till overheard me saying to the OH how much I liked it - they had half a dozen or so of previous special exhibitions up on the wall and said 'We have that for sale in that basket over there' so I sort of felt obliged to buy one since I had just been saying how much I loved it, without really thinking through the practicalities. Anyway we stuffed it with socks and got it back unscathed. It's now on the back of my study door and it looks really good. 

Over in Gamla Stan (The Old Town) there is a Sci-Fi bookshop, although calling it a sci-fi bookshop is a bit like describing  an eight course banquet as a nice meal. It's amazing. It does sell sci-fi books but it sells an awful lot of other fantasy/sci-fi related stuff. We'd been past it before but never gone in; this time we thought we'd give it a go and see if we could find a nice present for Son no 2., which we did. We spent ages in the shop and I saw three things I really wanted and bought two of them. Which is good going for me. The one I didn't buy was the follow up book to Godkiller, which a couple of months ago I was lamenting in this very place  would not be out in paperback until next January. Well it transpired that it in some places it must be out a lot sooner than that, since it was sitting on the shelves of this shop in Stockholm. Possibly it was an LFP (large format paperback) if they still do those. I planned to buy it since I was keen to read it but then on the upper level (yes, there's a lower level, a mezzanine and an upper level, the place is huge)  I saw this

and I just had to have it. I'd already seen some stationery I wanted - that looked like this - 

and as I couldn't justify buying two books and some writing paper on a whim all for myself - which I recognise is irrational and foolish, but it's how I am - I decided against buying the Godkiller follow up and settled for the stationery and the LotR knitting book. 

I know the stationery is designed with the tastes of adolescent Japanese girls in mind but I liked it and  I'm learning to accept that sometimes I just like 'cute stuff' and to go with the flow. The pattern book is amazing. Often when you buy a book full of patterns you only really like maybe 4 or 5 of them and I didn't look all the way through this one before I bought  it, because really what LotR fan who is also a knitter doesn't want to knit something called 'Second Breakfast Mittens' as featured on the front cover here and isn't too bothered about the rest? However almost all of the patterns in the book, of which there are 27, spoke to me in a good way. I won't be kitting a Gollum toy, or a dwarf helmet any time soon but many of the rest may eventually turn up here.