Pippi Långstrump and Stockholm Consolation

Notes on a trip to Stockholm and my former home

Pokemon cards, The Phantom Tollbooth, those fried potato things shaped like smiley faces. One of my favourite bits of being a dad is having an excuse to relive childhood passions without coming across as weird and regressive.

And this is the same for what we do on holiday as well.

We were visiting our old home of Stockholm recently, which meant the chance to go to my (and, who nows, maybe my kids’?) favourite attraction: a museum dedicated to the books of children’s author Astrid Lindgren called Junibacken on the Stockholm island of Djurgården.

Men tiptoeing toward forty are likely not Junibacken’s target market, but I love the place. And what I love most, despite it being entirely in Swedish, is the live musical performance featuring Lindgren’s best known character: Pippi Longstocking (or Pippi Långstrump in the original Swedish).

Swedish children’s literature, and Finnish for that matter, has a habit of putting the joys of life in close proximity with the inevitable sadnesses. Half of Lindgren’s stories, after all, are about children living in squalor, falling out of windows or dying from various pulmonary diseases. And this melancholy bent is what I appreciate most about the Pippi show.

The first song of the performance, an almost inappropriately beautiful, elegiac thing full of minor key inflections and a heart-stopping key change that makes me want to believe in the power of love again, teaches us that Pippi is alone and parentless; her mother dead and her father lost at sea.

This particular plot point is made clear, despite my terrible Swedish, when Pippi fashions an ersatz mum and dad out of a bag of flour and a football respectively.

Think a more Swedish Wilson from that Tom Hanks film and you’ll have the right idea.

It’s not all miserable, of course. During the 20 minute run-time, Pippi makes new friends and endless fun is had with her live-in monkey. But even after all that, her deep loneliness and loss is never fully brushed away. Pippi ends her day looking to the stars, reassuring her dead mother that she’ll always be OK, and the shadowy image of her missing father is projected onto the stage.

Considering the loss young Pippi lives with, it comes as no surprise she fashions those makeshift replacements of her parents to hold on to. Sometimes even the smallest thing, be it a picture, a video, an object as simple as a football with eyes drawn on it, makes all the difference when trying to hold on to a place or person we have lost.

As someone who has moved around so much in life, far now from many places and people I love, I suppose that’s why Pippi’s story means a little more to me than your average middle aged man.

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My family and I have visited Junibacken every time we’ve been back in Stockholm since we moved to Finland 5 years ago. But what I did for the first time on this trip was visit my old restaurant: Oaxen.

Since the kids needed feeding anyway, and Oaxen is only a short walk from Junibacken on Djurgården, I thought this might finally be the opportunity to indulge in selfish nostalgia and visit once again.

Oaxen was built over a decade ago in a huge renovated boat house that over decades had fallen into ruin, and to get there I took my kids on a scenic route along Djurgården’s island shore. The waterside route took us past various boats and yachts, and eventually we reached the row of wooden sheds boat owners use to keep their sailing equipment in. Oaxen owned one of these as well, though we used it to store the charcoal for our grill. Every day I worked there I would hoist a huge but surprisingly light sack of that coal over my right shoulder, take another in my left hand, and walk slowly across the car park to the towering, glass-panelled former boat house that was Oaxen.

Taking that walk again, my two children in hand instead of sacks of coal, gave me the strangest feeling of time’s total meaninglessness. As though the past and the present had confused each other and melted into one seamless expression of effect and cause.

We went round the back of Oaxen at first. I wanted to see again the waterside deck that looked out toward the archipelago where my colleagues and I would sit between services and eat staff food. Sometimes, when it was really hot in the summer, we’d even strip off and jump into the water.

But that balcony isn’t there anymore; not in the way I knew it. It has been developed into a small coffee shop “annex” and, being entirely full of beautifully dressed Stockholmites, we went round the front again to look for space in the main restaurant.

We were served by a blonde and smiling young woman whose face I had to survey more than once to decide whether I’d worked with her half a decade ago. But, like so much of the place, she was new as well. In the years since I left in 2020, the restaurant has been sold, the name changed, the style of food different entirely. In place of the modern, Michelin Star restaurant deeply influenced by Nordic food, technique and history that I knew, the menu of Slipen (as it’s now called) offers a few pasta dishes and salads.

I bought my kids lasagna from the children’s menu. I chose not to eat. All I was really interested in was working out how I could ask to see the kitchen without sounding like a weirdo who secretly wanted to steal their parmesan or spike their marinara sauce with rat poison.

In the end, I chose just to be honest.

“I used to work here,” I said to the blonde waitress.

“At Oaxen?” she said.

I was grateful for that question. Not because it made me feel like I was anything special, I just liked the way Oaxen was still remembered.

“I’ve heard it was very different,” she said.

She led me into the kitchen, and I could see how right she was.

Our large, circuitous kitchen of service stations and prep surfaces that had been built around a central charcoal grill that extended into the ceiling was gone. The kitchen I knew, so full of noise and conversation and chefs moving between each other like the breeze through branches of a tree, was replaced now with a single chef and a single thin and clinical service line. A newly-built wall slicing through the spot where the cold section used to be rendered the entire kitchen a fraction of the size I knew it.

“A new room was built on the other side,” the lonely chef told me, gesturing to the new wall, “We have the bread ovens there for the coffee shop.”

I walked a few steps further in, just to see if I could find any sense of the place I once knew. And then I found it. Beyond the room of new ovens, beyond what remains of the now twisted and malformed kitchen, the past returned. The dry store room, a lighter colour now, perhaps, but unmistakable. A memory erupted of the time I almost blacked out after 8 hours in front of the 400°C oven and my friend Marcus sat me down in there with a bottle of Coke. So visual was the memory that 7 years ago may as well have been happening all over again. Marcus was one of the best cooks I ever worked with and it always amused me how his home kitchen consisted of a toaster and a kettle for packet ramen. You’ll never have a better friend than the one who makes you laugh after 8 hours and hundreds of covers of a restaurant shift. I wondered where Marcus is now.

I thanked the waiter and shook the cook’s hand. My daughter had been waiting patiently in her pram and I went back to her. I took my son by his hand. And then I left what was once Oaxen for what I think will be the last time.

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On the way back to our hotel room I searched on my phone for Oaxen’s old instagram account. They really made an effort with their social media, and their page was full of pictures and videos of us all, the food and beautiful waterside location. After seeing how different the place had become, and how much being in that space brought the past so vividly back to life, I was keen to experience it again in the way pictures and videos and objects sometimes allow.

But there was no Oaxen to be found anymore. Not even in the list of accounts I follow. What I did find there was the account of a restaurant I couldn’t remember ever having chosen to follow at all. And, strangely, all my old Oaxen colleagues followed it as well. I scrolled down its grid and into the past. Past the pictures of pasta, past the pictures of people I didn’t recognise in a familiar place. I sped my scrolling up, the weeks and months of imagery turning into a blur of colour dotted with plates of food and smiling Stockholmites eating buns on the deck I once ate staff food. And then it stopped. Nothing left to scroll. The earliest picture remaining posted on a date in May 2023, the first day a restaurant called Slipen opened its doors.

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