# Anneli Holmén-Takahashi Raised Three Famous Children and Remembers Only the Porridge

In a Luleå kitchen at the edge of winter, a woman who knows everything about three famous households offers one fact, and it is about oats.

By Sven Torkelsson · 2026-11-02 · Weird · Luleå

Are you still up? Good. Me too. The snow came to Luleå an hour ago and it is sitting very quietly on the cars.

I want to tell you about Anneli Holmén-Takahashi. She lives in Mjölkudden, third floor, in a kitchen that smells of butter at every hour. She looked after three famous children. Three. In three different houses, over many years.

I asked her whose they were. She turned the heat down under a steel pot and said they liked porridge.

I asked what the houses were like. She said the stoves were too clean to stir anything on. I asked what the parents were like. She said they were always on the way somewhere, and the porridge was not.

So I asked what she put in it. She told me. Rolled oats, never quick. Water first, milk at the end. A pinch of salt the size of a snowflake and a cube of butter that is allowed to melt by itself. Forty minutes before school, 6:40 on the dot. She has said this to me twice now, the same way, like a hymn.

I have talked to people who will give you a whole childhood for the price of a coffee. Anneli will give you a ratio. Two to one, a little more water on cold days.

Somewhere tonight three famous people are asleep, and I think each of them has a small warm spoon-shaped memory they cannot place. It will come to them in a hotel breakfast room in some other country. They will look down and not know why they feel looked after.

She stirs clockwise. I asked if that matters. She said it matters to her.

Go on, then. Put the oats on. Goodnight.

Source: https://oddy.one/a/2026-11-02-anneli-holmen-takahashi-raised-three-famous-children-and-remembers-only-the-porr/