Birthday

Today is my 50th birthday, and with some big life changes coming I thought that blogging my 50th year might be a good thing to do. Except it is not my 50th year of course. That has already gone. I have lived through fifty summers, fifty winters, fifty Christmasses, and now fifty birthdays. The Scandinavians have a better take on this. They often talk about "filling" (in Swedish "fyller") or completing years instead of birthdays. So in Swedish today "jag fyller 50 år" - I complete 50 years. I quite like that way of looking at it.

Of course the Swedes don't get it all right in terms of language and time. Like a number of other European languages, when they say "half-past nine" ("half nio") they actually mean 8:30. You have to think of it as "half-to", which just seems silly to us, and can make booking a restaurant table an interesting process.