I started some time in January, February to gather information for "The Day". Wrote e-mails to all the different tourist boards in all the different provinces in Sweden. Told them a little bit about myself and what I was going to do and what sort of info I would like – most of all posters! After about a week big envelopes started coming through the mailbox , but no posters……….

• They don´t do posters anymore!
• They say – check our website out!
• You can´t put websites on the wall!

Oh, I did get one poster from the province of Ångermanland – with a picture of a tin of fermented herring!

So, what do you do? – You have to find pictures in magazines to cut out and create your own posters!

And I drew a life size moose! As you can see he took up most of my kitchen floor. I had a picture that I drew a grid on and then copied to a slightly larger format….

Then Hälge the Moose needed painting which Mam and I did in our conservatory. I did most of the preparations out there because it was the only place in the house big enough to spread everything out…… It was a good job we had a long and cold spring!

Mr George, Sven´s class teacher, is a very skilled musician, well anything creative really. He also acts in the theatre. Some time ago he got himself an accordion and started playing happy accordion tunes. On Australia Day the 26^th of January he played Waltzing Matilda and other Australian melodies after school when the parents were allowed in for a browse. I got very excited and recorded a tape for him with a mixture of Swedish music, from classical music to polka and a Swedish dance called hambo and other nice accordion music with Kalle Jularbo, Benny Andersson (of ABBA) and of course I started with our National Anthem, sung by one of our most famous singers, Sven-Erik Magnusson.

This is how Mr Joe George re-wrote the lyrics so that the children would be able to read and pronounce the words properly.

He was practising this with Sven´s class and on Sweden Day he played his accordion and it sounded so nice and homely! He had learnt some of Benny Andersson´s melodies by heart, he has a very good ear for music!

I was also during the spring making a new – bigger hmmm.. – waistcoat for my national costume, the old one had in some strange way shrunk a few sizes! It was finished well on time!

And I was sent som white hair pins from my friend Pamela in Sweden so that I could fasten the bonnet properly on my head and it stayed on very well all day.

Then my friend Janne in Varberg in Sweden and I was creating a document together with internet links to different venues in Sweden of interest to children. We were throwing ideas and questions and maps back and forth between Varberg and Astwood Bank! How do you add arrows, I wondered and Janne tells me. How do you create text boxes I ask and Janne shows me! We find different pictures and things to put in this document.

Here you can view the finished product, and I must say that this is teamwork of highest dignity! Janne and I put the information together in the spring of 2001 and now Christian on Blekinge-Rötter helped me to adapt this document for my web page. What would life be without good friends?

I sent this document to school in an e-mail and they have now opened this and started using it in the IT lessons. I created a poster with the page in the middle and glued pictures from the different places all round it so that they would have a rough idea of what is on the different web pages. The poster has been put on the wall by the computer connected to internet in their IT room.

Unfortunately there was one area that wasn´t covered well enough for my liking and that was sports! We had by all means a few sports items displayed, slalom skis and boots and orientering maps and compass etc. And Marek went in to Birmingham’s one and only icehockeyrink and managed to borrow protection gear for a ten year old goalie!

Here you see Christian Shpati, 10 years old, from Kosovo all geared up with Sven´s cousin Ludvig´s Swedish National Hockey team shirt on top! What do you think? Does he feel like a real ice hockey lion? I think he quite enjoyed being a hockey hero for a while.