When there is a choice, you can endure a lot. I'm aware of this, up in the morning bedroom at the farm in the north, tucked into my mountain sleeping bag under a double layer of thick quilts, dressed in my merino underwear, a thick pair of polar socks and the woollen sweater Anna knitted for me. The reason for this predicament is Russia's insanities in The Ukraine, and the raging cost of electricity in their wake. We simply cannot afford the electricity it takes to work the geothermal heating we normally use, and have used all the winters I've been up here with Anna. I don't HAVE to endure; I can go back down to my apartment/retreat south of Stockholm by the Baltic coast, 1000 kilometers due south, where I can enjoy a steady +20°C all day and all of the night (like The Kinks would put it!), and where I still have one more year of a set low electricity cost, and district heating However, there are reasons to endure! In addition to the obvious - Anna and the animals - there are the endless forests with their neural pathways of snow scooter tracks, and the many frozen-over lakes, ice covered with snow, both instances perfect for skiing, - and the spacious silence, embellished with snow flakes creeping across the windows, the sound of the wind in the pines and spruces and your thoughts finally having all the space they need to become poems or plans to realise, or the spacetime you need to prepare for the inevitable, which no one has yet escaped, even though daft religious rumours says something else. Having to work some for the basics, like carrying firewood from the shed, kneel by the big burner in one of the outhouses to fire up the system in – 30°C, and feed the wood stove in the main room downstairs in the main building, where we reside, to finally get the indoor up to T-shirt level around lunch time, has a value unto itself. You never feel unconnected to the circumstances or the surroundings or the general living conditions here on the farm. It fills your day, touches your body, fires up your mind and the planetary being inside, and leaves a trace of reflections and poems and ways of survival, that you simply don't encounter in city living, and the birds flock around you, the squirrels make visits, the woodpeckers bang away and at the outer perimeter, Yannis, the fox, strolls by, having fetched some organic waste from the compost behind the stable - and at times you sense some of the feelings left behind out here in this semi-wilderness by earlier generations, hundreds of years ago, with the difference that they had no choice but to pull through or die, without a supermarket forty kilometers away, or a hospital with state-of-the-art care sixty kilometers off, provided by the tax-paying citizens - so through this forenoon I spend the pauses between walks out to the wood burner in the outhouse and the feeding of the horses out in the meadow in the warmth that starts to fill the house, with the Persian ney player Hassan Kasaei on Spotify, physically quite aware of the elements surrounding our house this cold and sunny winter's day, leaving one of my choices unchosen - and we can always be sure of a warm, soothing tiredness by the end of the day, when sleep will come, effortlessly and angelic, the stars standing watch around this house on the hill.