Kvidinge

In the early 1800s the King of Sweden died without leaving an heir (how irresposible) and a distant relation from (I think) Denmark was appointed the Crown Prince. On his way to the captial for his offical coronation, he suffered a stroke and died in Kvidinge and there is a monument there erected in his memory. The Swedes, having no one now to be their king, solved the conundrum by requesting one of the lesser nobility from the France to take the position, and the royal family today is directly descended from that line.

Well, that's the official story. The unofficial one is that, overweight and unfit, Carl August suffered a heart attack from the strain of the horse ride (I don't know why he didn't take a carriage, isn't that what the nobility do?) There are alternative rumours of him being poisoned, but the heart attack story is much more amusing...

Today, Kvidinge has a population of just under 2000 but it's hard for me to feel as if it's some isolated little backwater village because there's a couple of other towns that are about a five minute drive away and the nearest city, Helsingborg, is about 20 minutes away. In Australian terms, Kvidinge seems more of a suburb than a village, although there's a cursory amount of geographical isolation because of some farmlands in the area.

Besides boning up on local ancient scandal, I've also read the last installment of Harry Potter (the "happy ever after" epilogue made me feel a bit nauseous but otherwise it was a quite entertaining read), indulged in some very deluxe, gourmet Danish chocolate from a little place in Helsingborg, watched a LOT of Monty Python (Henrik has the entire series on DVD), shaken my fist at bureaucracy because there are problems with my visa application for France, cooked -- mostly dinners but also some fruity desserts (Henrik has raspberry bushes in his back yard!! Bliss!!) and put in the final touches on my plans for world domination ... er, I mean I've taken lots of bracing and healthy walks around the village.