Don’t you hate it when your nearest and dearest fail to appreciate your finely developed sense of humor? When it comes to funny, I firmly believe that repeating a stupid joke to the point of absurdity makes it so much funnier.
Unfortunately, my husband has other ideas.
“Don’t say that again,” he begs me, and threatens revenge. My favorite stupid joke with him was to point out, every time we walked by it, a not-terribly imposing 17th century mansion behind a gate on upper Drottninggatan.
“Spökslottet,” I’d say to him as if he’d never seen it before.
“Yeah, right,” he’d mutter.
I always rather liked the place. The name is intriguing: Spökslottet literally means the Ghost Manor. But it’s not terribly haunted looking, at least not to my American eyes. It’s a typical Stockholm yellow manor house of its time, although the gate is vaguely spooky. But it has a certain charm, and a nice set of gardens to the side which are perfect for sitting and eating an ice cream cone, gardens which is in fact are where the supposed ghost walks.
Last winter, long after I’d been forced to give up the joke, we walked past Spökslottet and continued down Drottninggatan. To our horror, a block down we saw that one of our favorite restaurants, Grill (Drottninggatan 89), had burned during the night and was a black and charred hole in the building it was in.
“Oh, no!” my husband said. “That’s so sad.”
We continued down the street, wondering who or what had caused the fire, whether it was an accident or arson, and if they would ever open again.
Interior at Grill. Photo Micael Engström
It wasn’t until the other day, the restaurant now back up and running, all fixed and clean and with even more outrageous décor than ever before, that I thought about who might have caused the fire that burned down grill.
Could it have been the ghost of Spökslottet, trying to sneak something to eat during a late-night binge?