My life

The school

Rosenholm School

After playground I started at the Rosenholm School. My dad was the headmaster and my mom was teacher, so I was a rather well behaved pupil. I formed part of a really good class and we hade great teachers. On the junior stage we had Vera Aurand, which was adored by everybody. There was hymn singing every morning and peace and order. On the intermediate stage we had May-Sofie Olsson, and things were also under total control. The only bad mark was when I shot a huge rubber from the back part of the teaching room which landed on the teacher's desk right in front of May-Sofie. I confessed immediately, so no big fuss was made out of it.

In the summers we used to play land hockey and there was always a big fight over who would get the best sticks. In the winters we fought for the snow mountain, normally it was the pupils of the sixth grade (the oldest ones) that dominated (shame on you von Knorring for only picking on me and not on somebody of your size :).

I had some athletic success and won the gold medal in the terrain running two years in a row and also won the long jump.

The only sad memory for the Rosenholm School was then Lille died. Lille was our neighbour and my best friend and he got cancer when he was only 9 years old.

Central School

If the Rosenholm school was quiet, my somewhat twisted tendencies started to show during my time at the Central school, especially during the last year. The Central school is in Nässjö, which means that I had to commute in bus every day.

After many hours of technology classes with Murre Sprätt, biology with Eva-Lisa Hellman-Carlsson, geography with Arne Enwall, maths with Sven-Erik Olsson, social science with Britt-Inger Broberg, English with Nils Carstensen and German with Bodil Lindomborg, my accomplice Thomas Ahnström and I decided to publish an underground magazine, HOT (you can read all the issues here). We tried to throw everybody off the scent and blamed the girls in the eighth grade and nobody knew that we had published it. The magazine reached some cult status on the school.

Suddenly and without wanting it too much I was appointed voluntary to design our SUCK t-shirt (SUCK is an alternative used in the schools to the military expression MUCK, which signifies the end of your military service). I made a drawing of a hammer-thrower, whose arm comes loose in the moment of throwing away a beaver's skull (to my defence I might add that the headmaster had name of this rodent as his pet name, possibly he had gotten it because of his impressive dental garniture).

The Brinell College

This was without comparison my best time as a student. Naturally I had applied to the technical program, and I found myself in a great class at the Brinell College in Nässjö with Barbro 'Babsan' Lindgren as the form teacher and classmates like Stålet, Bizarrpersson, Uffe Jansson, Sjöstrand, Jung, Isbjörnen, Einarsson and lots more. Just like Sjöstrand I hade chosen the electrical branch, but after the first lesson with Arne we made a very quick change to the machine technical branch, a totally correct decision looking at it years after. Ahnström stayed, which made him go more or less crazy.

A Babar cult was initiated around me. Babar, the stuffed cloth elephant with the powerful trunk, hallowed be thy name. I can think of several incidents:

• My portrait of Babar which, replaced the photo of Berzelius during a whole semester in the chemistry classroom.

• Stålet, who had almost finished the drawing of Babar (the tusks were missing) on the black board when the teacher Thomas entered the classroom and thought that the drawing was of something completely different.

• The poster, which announced the disco 'Babar OverDrive' which I made together with Sjöstrand.

What can one say? There were supersonic spins in the classrooms, uncontrolled screams and on the technology classes Sjöstrand and I developed EPUT - the Eternal Phase Universal Theory. Between classes we improved the sayings in our agendas. But did we never study? Well, yes, despite of some fooling around and nonsense we never went lost track.

During my second year at the Brinell College I was doing some chemistry experiments, we are talking about of mixtures which rapidly consumed oxygen, which are normally classified as homemade bombs. After a slight miscalculation, when I tried to drill a hole in a steel tube AFTER having filled it with chemicals, the tube exploded and caused me a number of deep flesh wounds on my torso and legs. Things could have turned out really bad for me, but I was lucky and the only remains from the accident are some 40 course stitches. Babsan gave me a third grade in chemistry, despite of the incident, and I got a big, stuffed Babar from my classmates.

It got my driver's licence and after having wasted 200 kg of blast sand on my dad's old SAAB 99, we dismissed the plans of ever shaping up that car. Instead I drove around in my grandpa's Volvo 360 GLT.

During the last year of the technical program I started lifting weights together with Uffe Jansson used to run to stay in shape. I exercised hard to become the '100 kg man', which referred to lifting 100 kg in bench press.

Hmmm... I hope there will be a class reunion some day. It would be fun to see what everybody is doing today.

The University of Skövde

After receiving the higher school examination I applied for and was admitted to the program in Technology and Export Management at the University of Skövde. During the first year we kept a very high pace with a lot of basic courses in maths, etc. My brother had studied at HiS before me, and it was soon clear to me that he hade been a party man. I preferred to keep a lower profile.

During the second year we started studying large amounts of German, I had some motivation problems and got behind. It went so far that I started looking for jobs - I wanted something else to do. My rescue came in the summer of 1994 when I got a summer job at Saab Dynamics in Jönköping. Working with my mentor Kjell Gunnarsson I discovered how great it was knowing things.

When the autumn semester started I was well behind in the studies, and I was not admitted the student allowance. A temporary loan from my parents solved the situation that time, and after having approved a lot of exams the allowance started dropping in again.

I had a tough program during the last two years in Skövde, I recovered most of the German and really worked hard on the new courses. I got good grades on most of the courses and also managed to study some extra courses.

My best fellow students in Skövde were Christer, Jocke and Ullberg. We used to do the group tasks together, and among others we made an analysis of the organisation at the match factory in Tidaholm. There were a bunch of good guys in our class and it was be great to have another university reunion.

During the stay in Skövde I kept lifting weights (and managed to lift 105 kg in bench press, which still is my personal best) and running (the Billingen is a tough but fair).

I changed cars two times during my period of studies in Skövde. My first 'own' car was a Volkswagen 1200 -64 with a 6 volt electrical system which had a lot of problems starting. This gave cause to my first parking ticket, which I disputed and actually got away with it (the only time it has happened to me). However, the car was not very practical, so I sold it and bought a SAAB 900 GL - 84 instead. This was an inexpensive and practical car and I almost regret having sold it.

My VW 1200 with 64 HP

Read more here: < The first stumbling years | Tidaholm >