Writer’s Diary

19 January 2026

There are views which come as a reminder that the human eye belongs to this world in a way the camera never will.

I sit here, looking out over a half-frozen fjord at Ljungskile on the Swedish west coast. The wooded islands and small hills fold into each other, layered with a touch of mist on this winter’s afternoon. Streaks of ice on the nearer outcrops. Wooden houses tucked around their contours. I pick up my phone to take a photo, look at the result and laugh at myself.

This world was not meant for camera lenses in the way that it was meant for eyes. With enough skill, enough technology, the right photographer can produce wonderful results, but there is an ease with which the gaze meets the visible world and wanders through it, an ease with which no technical solution can compete. I’ve known this before and I’m brought back to it now.

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I’m here on my final mission before I settle down and write the rest of the book. The Swedish word uppdrag has a satisfying ring: it means “mission”, but it’s also the word for any freelance assignment or set of responsibilities you take on.

They asked me to come and speak at the New Year’s Forum which has been held at the folk high school here each January since the 1970s. I got an hour this morning to stand and deliver, at the start of the two-day gathering, and I’ll go on stage again at the end of the afternoon tomorrow – alongside the other keynote speaker, the philosopher Jonna Bornemark – to take the questions that come back from all the smaller conversations going on in different corners of the school as I write this.

It’s a good set-up. More and more, these days, I get to come into situations where the words I bring are given room to breathe over the length of a gathering, rather than trying to cram a Q&A onto the end of a talk, before any of us have had chance to digest what happened. To the organisers of such events, I’m grateful for your willingness to trust that things will happen and to make space for them to do so.

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Those of you who have seen me speak may be surprised to know that I went up there this morning with a deck of slides. Stayed up till after one in the morning putting them together, missing breakfast as a consequence, having to make do with coffee and cake.

Two years ago, I swallowed my pride and started to do talks in Swedish. I’ve lived here long enough and plan on staying. Better for me do the work than that everyone else should have to switch on my account.

It is work. I can weave a talk in English out of a page of notes and a lifetime of gathering stories, but if I’m going to deserve the attention of the room in a language where I don’t have that facility, I want to come prepared. So I’ll take three or four days in the writing, then Anna and I run through the whole thing in the course of an evening, as she helps me iron out the wrinkles that would trip a listener up.

But the upshot of this is that I now have a growing collection of texts that I’ve written in Swedish. And since it would be boring to repeat things already said and written, and since each invitation is a chance to engage with a particular setting and set of questions, these texts go places that my writing in English hasn’t.

As we were going through today’s talk, it struck me that in a couple more years, there will be enough of this material to publish a collection of my Swedish writings, and then translate it into English, which is a funny thought.

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The slides came about because I had a few photos from Östervåla which belonged to the talk I found myself writing.

The theme for the forum this year is “The Place We Call Home”. I called my talk “The Cost of Belonging” and spun it around the question: can you come to be at home in a place that no one will ever mistake you for coming from – and if so, how? It’s a question in which I have a personal stake, but also one that matters a good deal for our collective future.

This gave me the chance to work an Illichian sea-change on David Goodhart’s “Somewheres” and “Nowheres”, and to hold Roger Scruton’s “oikophobia” up to the unsparing light of Bonhöeffer’s distinction between the “cheap” and the “costly”. All woven through with the influence of Elizabeth Oldfield and Vanessa Andreotti and of the friendships which began in my Swedish for Immigrants class and the friendships made in our first five years in Östervåla.

So yes, I’ll write all this up and translate it – though not until I’m done with the book I have in hand.

In the meantime, I can’t show you a photo of what meets my gaze here in Ljungskile just now, but here is the view from the school gates, one winter’s afternoon in Östervåla, which was the image on my title slide this morning.

DH, Ljungskile, 19 January 2026

Thank you for reading these posts and for all the ways in which you readers support my work.

It was great to meet so many paid subscribers on the Zoom call in December. I’ll schedule another of those calls in a few weeks’ time, when there’s more to report from the work on the book.

I also have two or three substantial essays, written and published quietly a few years ago, which I’ve been persuaded to republish as posts on here in the coming months, so look out for the first of those – and meanwhile, there’s another post coming soon with the video of my conversation with Sajay Samuel.