Lock me up

Trollhättan is another of those places people like me are just going to like. Historically it was as far up the Göta river as boats could come into the interior of Sweden before hitting some inconveniently placed 30m high waterfalls. All that is in the past, now, with the falls bypassed by locks and canals. Each lock is hacked or blasted out of solid rock which means, once it's hacked, there's not much more you can do with it when it's served its time, apart from abandon it and start a new one. So, the old locks are still there in successive generations of size and depth, from the original which could barely have handled a narrowboat (and never handled anything; it was just too ambitious in height to for the gates to have withstood the pressure) to the present day one which can take small ships.

And what of the falls themselves, you cry? Tell us, for we must know! Well, they're still there. Again, there's not a lot you can do with a redundant set of falls that no longer have water running over them. They're sealed off by sluice gates and look quite picturesque when they're dry ...

... but even more picturesque when the sluices open for 10 minutes at 3pm every day to relieve pressure and 300,000 litres a second comes barrelling down the gorge.

A bit like watching those tsunami videos, it all seems to be happening so slowly. The water seems to take forever to reach you and yet suddenly it's there and you're really quite glad that you're not, and are in fact on the 30m high bridge overlooking the scene.

If Ozymandias had dug into rock rather than built statues of himself out of it, there would be a lot more evidence of his works to despair at.

Var optimist!

I have a new hero and I bet you've never heard of him, unless you're Swedish. Gustaf Dahlén: self-taught engineering genius and polymath, inventor of cookers and lighthouse equipment among many other things, one of the founders of AGA, and social visionary. Raised on a farm with no education beyond the basic that the village school could provide, he went on to create an engineering company with fingers in a thousand pies and which pioneered modern concepts like profit sharing and employee engagement.

The Dahlén Museum in Stenstorp is retro-engineering heaven, and where else would you find a heart and lung machine with an AGA logo?

And wood and formica, and buttons to press and dials to turn. So many ...

Not to mention an actual AGA car (briefly manufactured in the 1930s) and, the thing that really made him famous, lighthouse equipment: pre-electronic, pre-electrical and only requiring precision engineering and sound mechanical principles to work. Like his sun valve, a device powered only by thermal expansion to make sure lighthouse lights only came on at night, and which could also drive the rotation of the mechanism. The one installed in Stockholm harbour worked flawlessly until the 1980s without any servicing.

Sadly neither of those photograph particularly well in the museum.

Two things in particular that I like about him. One was that, as a teenager, he anticipated Wallace & Gromit by 100 years and invented a device that would turn on the light and the heating and make the coffee before he got out of bed in the morning. He was going to go one step further and make a device that would tilt the bed to get him out of it, but was talked out of it by his younger brother, who had to share the bed with him.

The other is that even though he was blinded  for life at the age of 43, in an explosion while testing the pressure-holding capabilities of different types of cylinder, he was an incurable optimist. His motto was "Var Optimist" ("Be an optimist") and he had hundreds of badges made saying just that, which he would whip out and pin onto any prophet of woe that he might encounter.

It's purely coincidental that it looks like a line of code ...

The fundamental things apply to rock carvings and Earthsea

The west coast of Sweden is flat, fertile farmland, except where it isn’t. Where it isn’t is because of rocks – large, red-grey protrusions, dropped and worn smooth by ice thousands of years ago and jutting out of the soil. At the bottom end of the scale are the ones the size of a small car or maybe a house – they can be landscaped around. At the top end are the ones tens of metres high and the size of a city block. These are more accurately known as geography and there’s no landscaping here – they are the landscape and you just go around them.

At one point, the flat farmland disappears below sea level but the rocks remain. At this point you now have an archipelago.

Fjällbacka is a town on the west coast, overlooked by the 75m high Vetteberget. I decided that if I weren’t already married, this is where I would have proposed. We were there at about 5pm in the afternoon, which is nowhere near sunset at that latitude but still the sun is low enough to sparkle on the water and the black dots of the islands stretch as far away towards the horizon as you can see. If you’ve never read Ursula le Guin’s Earthsea novels, now would be a very good time to start.

It was also a favourite haunt of Ingrid Bergman and they remember her fondly.

We also took a boat out to Väderöarna, largest of the islands and Sweden’s most westerly inhabited possession. Now I was not only thinking of Earthsea but also of I, Claudius, as the fate of several characters at one point or another is to be exiled to a small barren rock in the Mediterranean – the worse your downfall, the smaller and more barren the rock. If Sweden went in for that kind of thing, this place would be littered with exiles. So inevitably I got to thinking up plots and, do you know, I might actually write a story – now there’s a thing.

But there’s things to see inland too. What actually brought us to the area in the first place were the rock carvings of Tamunshede – a late Bronze Age, World Heritage phenomenon. 3000 years ago someone worked out another use for those rocky surfaces – you can carve on them. (Rather, chip away at them to a depth of between 0.5-1cm.) There are four main locations all within a couple of miles, all on south- or east-facing stones, and all on stones where the water continues to run down for a while even when it’s stopped raining. They have been coloured in by present day experts so they can actually be seen – they are so faint as to be invisible in their natural form.

Of course, we only have modern day interpretations to go on, but …

A lot of the time, men are attacking each other with axes.

At one point they are distinctly on a boat as they do so. Were they having sea battles back then?

From the design, the boats are clearly ancestors of the Viking longships, though experts say boats that size couldn’t have been built back then. Therefore, these boats have a symbolic, religious meaning – maybe a way of voyaging to the afterlife. Well, maybe – but even so, were the longships eventually built that size because someone realised that in principle there was no reason they couldn’t be?

And if the boats are symbolic, why are guys still fighting on them?

All the bows found from that time are longbows but these are quite distinctly short, like those used by Asian horsemen. Was there contact? No reason why not. All you have to do is keep going east (or from the horsemen’s point of view, west).

You can’t help but notice just how male the men are – for some reason the women are identified by long hair rather than anything, um, organic. To the right sort of mind it gives rise to all kinds of humour – no, change that, I mean one particular kind of humour. I may have thought up a few jokes but I won’t share them and I didn’t buy the book.

And (we learned) the reason horsemeat isn’t generally eaten in Sweden is because eating horsemeat was seen as a pagan practice and therefore discouraged by the early church. So religion has its uses.

Vroom vroom bork bork bork

In Switzerland, apparently, speeding fines are determined by the speed you were doing and by your ability to pay. So, the Swedish gent who was clocked by Swiss police doing 290km/h or 180mph in a Mercedes sports car "could be given a world-record speeding fine of SFr1.08m ($1m; £656,000), prosecutors say."

This being Switzerland there will be four words for "schadenfreude", one of which is "schadenfreude".

And yet ...

This guy is Swedish, which I happen to know means he comes from a land where the average speed limit is 80 or 90km/h. Occasionally, just occasionally, a really good stretch of road will let you up to 100 and sometimes they go mad and let you do 110 for a stretch of about five miles before welcome sanity kicks in and they rope you back to 80 again.

For ease of reference, 8km = 5m. Do the maths.

Approaching a junction, even if you're in a 110 zone, the limit goes down to 70. And there are a lot of speed cameras. They're sign-posted but they're also unobtrusive - just slender little blue poles by the side of the road.

Not that most Swedes pay the limits the slightest attention, as far as I could see. We were rocking in the slipstream of Saabs and Volvos more times than I could remember. But even so, I do sympathise that this guy has probably wanted to go fast since he was born, and putting him a Merc in another country is just asking for trouble.

Should have been a fighter pilot, then ...

The murders are all in Ystad so it's quite safe

For anyone googling "good places to eat in Gothenberg", we recommend the Cafe Caprese on Kungsgatan. For anyone googling "places to stay in Gothenberg", the answer is the Best Western Hotell Göteborg. It's reasonably priced, clean and friendly, right on the waterfront and (most of) the rooms have astonishing views over the harbour. Bonusbarn's didn't but who cares, he was only there one night. We were there for four.

Last year it became clear that our annual in-law viewing pilgrimage to Sweden was approaching crisis point. My father-in-law was getting more and more frail, imposing social obligations upon himself that he was unable to meet, and we had seen every single thing worth seeing within a daytrip at least once before. Bonusbarn was on the point of open rebellion. So, this year it was different. First a brief, flying visit to the relatives, and as my father-in-law now lives in sheltered accommodation we stayed in my sister-in-law's apartment. TV! Internet! Water straight from the mains, not from a well and so laced with iron it tastes like blood! No sign of a mouse dropping anywhere near a food preparation area! (Or indeed, before my sister-in-law screams and comes over to kill me, anywhere else either.)

And then we went to stay in Gothenburg. I've only caught glimpses of this before now, en route to and from the airport. It looked like an exciting, historic, European town with a harbour and trams and long boulevards and wide, cobbled squares. And guess what, it's all of those.

The squares are ideal for sitting in and partaking of coffee and sweet cardamom buns while you engage in a text conversation with your mother back in England. This being the southern end of Sweden, the ground is mostly successful at being completely flat, but here and there are outcroppings of smooth rock left behind by the glaciers. There's no doing anything with them except living with them, so they got built around or onto or into. So, you may turn a corner off a boulevard and suddenly find yourself facing a sheer rock face, or a ramp, or a vertiginous little stairway that goes up or down to somewhere, adding exciting new and random elements to your day. Meanwhile the whole city sparkles in the sunshine - in fact, weather was quite unreasonably good for somewhere the latitude of Inverness. Short sleeves every day, short trousers most days, every meal and snack other than breakfast was eaten outside somewhere. The first drops of rain fell literally as we got off the bus at the airport, which I think is good Swedish courtesy to a T.

The harbour is in fact just a wide river, broad and sweeping and a beautiful thing to behold from ground level or a fifth floor hotel room or from the top of one of the aforesaid outcroppings.

From our room we could look right to the historic bit, or left to a still fully functioning modern shipyard.

For the culture, And There Was Light is a highly recommended experience, should it come to a city anywhere near you - a hightech, multimedia exhibition about Leonardo and Michelangelo and Raphael, put into the context of the times and politics of Rome and Florence and Milan: the things they did, the ways they overlapped. I had never realised, until seeing a lifesize replica (still haven't seen the original), why Michelangelo's David stands as he does in that slightly poncy pose. His left hand is holding his sling and his right hand, which you can't really see from the front, is holding the stone with which he's about to zot Goliath. He stands like that because he is thoughtfully sizing up Goliath across the valley, or possibly thinking "crikey, are other blokes' all that big?"

(Un)fortunately a ticket into And There Was Light also gets you into the maritime museum, the city museum, the art museum ... we were pretty well museumed by the end of it. Even before getting to Gothenburg, we passed through the Aeroseum, an airforce museum inside an old nuclear bunker next to the City Airport. I got to sit in a Saab Draken.


On the harbour front there is also the Maritiman, a static display of ships that you can walk around and clamber over and explore. These include a destroyer (I much prefer the Swedish term "Jagaren" - Hunter!) and a Draken class submarine. So I did a lot of Drakening, one way or another.

For those of a more traditional bent, this chap was moored opposite the hotel ...

... A genuine reproduction East Indiaman. So, from now on, whenever CS Forester or Patrick O'Brien mentions an East Indiaman, I'll know what they're on about.

I love Gothenburg and want to go back. Next year, the coast and islands ...

Randomly seen in Sweden

Well, it says it like it is.

One church has a particular missionary focus on Japan. Here is one of its mission tools for younger readers.

This advert for a conference organiser translates as: "Mummy has gone to a conference where she can eat as much popcorn and icecream as she likes".



This restaurant could have put anything it liked on its wall ... so naturally it chose the Fibonacci sequence.

And finally: snigger.

Heroic factasy

I don't read much heroic fantasy, for various reasons. A good one is that it all comes in such fat multi-volume series that I simply don't have the time. But a deeper, slightly more sneaking one is that, well, it's all a bit silly, isn't it? It's not real. Science fiction is generally set in present-day or future societies that could happen. Fantasy is based on past societies that didn't happen, or can't happen, so there.

This isn't entirely fair but it's always there. Good heroic fantasy gets around it by being good. I recently read Joe Abercrombie's The Blade Itself and enjoyed it a lot: for the characters, the world-building, the humour and the sheer enjoyment of the writing. But still I get this nagging feeling that tells me I should be reading something else, and it isn't at all helped by reading something like Jan Guillou's Templar Trilogy.

Guillou himself is an interesting character - an investigative journalist and spy writer who did time in jail for revealing that the land of cuddly Volvo-driving Abba fans has a secret intelligence agency that can match the CIA dirty trick for dirty trick. That's life on the front line of the Cold War. His character of Arn Magnusson is a local Swedish folk hero because Guillou cleverly takes Arn's fictitious life and wraps it into real history in the form of the birth of the modern kingdom of Sweden. (Where I happen to be right now, but that's for a later blog post.) For instance, with a bit of handwaving the fictitious Arn becomes the grandfather of the very real Birger Jarl, whose grave I have seen and once sort of wrote a poem about. All the locations are visitable, and most of them are within a few miles of my inlaws. One of life's innocent pleasures is to watch Bonusbarn's face when he asks with resignation why we're looking at yet another church and we say "This is where Arn ..."

I was introduced to Arn's adventures by my future wife several years ago, but it's taken till now to finish them because at first only the first two books were translated into English. After that the publisher pulled the plug ... until recently. Different publisher, different translator, still the third book. Finally I know how it ends! Though given that Sweden exists, I had a shrewd suspicion.

In the first book, The Road to Jerusalem, Arn is born into minor Swedish nobility and for various reasons spends most of his childhood raised by monks, including an ex-Templar who teaches him various extracurricular non-monkly fighting skills. This is handy because at the end of the book Arn inadvertently sleeps (consecutively) with two sisters (hey, it could happen to any innocent young lad from the monastery), one of whom is his true love and one of whom is a scheming minx. For this sin he must do 20 years penance as a crusader in the Holy Land.

This brings us to the second book, The Templar Knight, which switches between his story and the story of the second crusade, and his beloved Cecilia doing her own 20 years penance in a convent back home. From her perspective we see the birth pangs of the new Swedish nation, while Arn's purity of heart, nobility and Christian virtue earn him the respect of Christians and Muslims alike, and make him one of the few crusaders, and very few Templars, to make it out of the Holy Land alive after the disastrous Battle of Tiberias. And finally - finally! - in Birth of the Kingdom Arn returns home determined to use his military skills and considerable wealth to bring peace to his homeland and forge it into a new nation, the kingdom of the Sveas, or Svea Rige, as you might call it.

If you read heroic fantasy for the world-building then medieval Sweden is described in enough detail to suit your every need, with no feeling of anything being contrived just to get a little extra buzz or laugh. (Plucking just one example from the air, like Arn and Cecilia's wedding night being unable to commence until the archbishop has made it up the stairs to bless them in bed.) If you read it for the military clashing and banging then Arn has it in spades, and the version of Christianity practised by the Swedes - a mixture of literalism, ritual, pragmatism and Marian veneration, all with residual pagan overtones - presses all the right buttons for anyone expecting arcane religions and magic. It's exactly the same as reading heroic fantasy, except that it isn't and it's a guilt-free trip.

Next up: Robert Harris's Lustrum, follow-up to Imperium, which I have previously reviewed and which has a similar effect.

Note: nothing herein in any way precludes me trying to write heroic fantasy if I ever decide that's the direction my career should take.

Påsk i Sverige

Pause for a moment and consider the end of eras.

Our usual habit is to come out to Sweden for a week, make a base at my father-in-law Morfar’s farm and venture out on day trips. Sadly, this habit is now so usual after many years that Bonusbarn is quivering on the point of mutiny, having seen all the local sights so often he could do the tourist commentary. Plus at Easter everything’s closed and other typical Swedish activities – walks, swims in lakes – aren’t really viable. So we’ll probably next be in Sweden next summer, 2010 – by which time my stepson will be an 18 year old school leaver, quite possibly with plans of his own for the summer.

And consider the old man himself, who is always delighted to see us but it clearly becomes more of a strain every time he does. He gets stressed that he isn’t being hospitable enough – but, confined to a wheelchair, that translates into micromanaging Best Beloved to ensure that she is providing us with the kind of service he would like to give us. Which really isn’t necessary. The slightest departure from his decreed norm causes him endless worry, and meanwhile he gets vaguer and more forgetful; unable to remember (for example) if he’s already demonstrated to us how he uses his pee bottle, and unable to conceptualise that maybe we don’t want a demo anyway.

In short, the kindest way of staying in touch in future will probably be a long weekend on the farm – we could probably coax Bonusbarn out that long – and then explore further afield, while we send the young man gratefully back home to his friends and wireless internet. There’s plenty more of the country I’d like to see and Best Beloved would like to show me. And Morfar is always convinced that each time he sees us will be the last anyway.

But it was a good stay. Previously we’ve had snow at Easter: the snow poles are still out on the roads and the hire car (a Volvo, the best result yet in the Avis lottery) still has studded tyres. And yet the weather was so summerlike that I often wished I had bought a light jacket instead of, or at least as well as, the winter coat. We didn’t have an Easter bonfire because Cousin Valter, who as a mere sprog of 82 is responsible for physical and maintenance activities on the farm, decreed that the undergrowth was too dry. Then the wind blew and I was grateful for the woollen jumper and cords. A season of contradictions.

I still love that little house on the Västergötland prairie. It’s made of wood, but so snug and tight that I could sit out a blizzard there. And so quiet. There were times I quite literally could not hear a thing apart from my own heartbeat. No one else in the house, no traffic, no wind, nothing. Quite astonishing. But it is a relief to know that tonight I sleep in my own bed, which must be as much younger than me as the one in Sweden is older.

We met Senior Niece’s baby, who is most babylike with a cute smile and habit of vomiting without warning or apology. As expected, really.


I enjoyed the unusual (for a writer) experience of a couple of hours’ honest work, helping Valter split logs. He has a machine for the purpose that pushes them against a metal blade and they split without any apparent effort. Harder than it looks.


Power lines run through some woods at one end of Morfar’s property, and new laws increasing the amount of free space around them has led to a few extra logs needing to be dealt with.


And then of course there was Easter. A fairly High Lutheran service but I was raised fairly High Anglican so can cope with that. The words are pretty easy to follow – the Lord’s Prayer, the creed ... Or this one? “Helig, Helig, Helig, Herre Gud Sebaot; Himlarna och jorden är fulla av din härlighet; Hosianna I höjden ...”

I had my annual reminder that the words for Spirit and Duck are the same: thus Helig Anden could be the Holy Spirit or the Holy Duck. You have to take your best guess.

It was an old church but refurbished in a modern style inside – big windows, pastel shades, pine furniture, comfortable chairs, full of light. The choir really sounded like they meant it, with some songs and tunes so joyful it didn’t matter that I understood one word in ten. During communion they sang a Taizé chant, over and over again, and kept singing as they went up to the rails. This meant that we who were among the last of the congregation to go up suddenly realised the singing was following us. Quite beautiful. The closing hymn was sung in question-and-answer style, with the men essentially asking what this Easter thing is all about and (appropriately for the season) the women telling them. It was a dignified, proper hymn with a light and happy tune that I've not heard before, but I wanted to take a copy to give to our own worship leader and say "more like that".

The sermon – I was told later – mentioned a Palestinian family whose 12 year old child was killed by an Israeli soldier. They donated the child’s heart and it now beats inside a young Israeli. The two families have got in touch and as much as possible are friends. And that, said the pastor, is the Easter message. Hear, hear.

[Previous Sweden posts for 2008, 2007 and 2006]

I fed no moose

[Previous Sweden posts here (2007) and here (2006)]

Didn't even see one, in fact. That's what comes of my lovely wife hailing from the south end of Sweden. However, it is an area replete with history, much of it to do with carving out the Swedish kingdom. Three pitched battles were fought within a few miles and years of each other to rid the country of the Danes, after which Sweden could get on with becoming. As my own parents live not too far from the stomping grounds of Alfred the Great, who did his own bit to rid us of the Danish yoke, I feel that as a family we have the Danes pretty well hemmed in.

At one of these places we found this stone lying on the ground (my lovely wife providing some human scale perspective):

But not just any stone! No, no. This is the Drängasten, weighing 368lbs/167kg. If you applied for a job on the farm, you had to lift it three times. If you wanted to marry the farmer's daughter, you lifted it seven times. I did marry a farmer's daughter but luckily I did it in England where brains are valued more than brawn in prospective spouses.

That interesting looking structure behind Best Beloved is in fact a belfry. The Swedish Christians got the idea of churches long before they got the idea of belfries to go with them, so they had to be added later. Here is church and tower together.


The white walls + black roofs and windows theme is a very common one among the churches, making them striking both from a distance and close up. The graveyards, as commented, are always immaculate, many not only with raked gravel paths but with rakes provided for visitors. I somehow don't see this catching on over here and it's our loss.

So, much driving around looking at immaculately kept churches and graveyards, and fields where battles were fought that decided the fate of nations. The post-glacial landscape is scattered with massive boulders, smooth and round, that break the surface like whales coming up to breathe. Often these natural outcroppings will have been utilised by the builders of forts and now the sites are also scattered with carved stones in such a way that you can't tell where geology ends and archaeology begins. Very Tolkienesque. In a similar vein, we came across these water falls where once there stood a mill, now just ruins. The entire far bank is in fact a wall, carved blocks of stone mouldering with moss and age. It really was like something out of Middle Earth.


Complete with trolls.


Yes, fairness makes me report we were accompanied all the while by a bored teenager who DESPITE being reminded as almost the very last thing to bring his iPod charger, didn't. No internet and no iPod for a week. Oh my, how cruel we are. Still, the alternative to coming with us was staying with his 80 year old non-English speaking grandfather, so really we were stuck with him and him with us.

This year's hire car was an Opel Astra - a nicely restrained and much preferable choice to last year's tank - and to alleviate the boredom I gave him driving lessons. Round and round his grandfather's yard, never higher than second - or if he felt really adventurous, down to the end of the drive, after which either I had to drive further to turn the car round or he had to reverse back. After the first couple of days he stopped leaving little craters behind as the wheels skidded at take off, and he was hardly ever stalling. It's a start. When he starts proper lessons he'll have to learn to change gear with his left hand rather than his right, but the pedals will still work the same way. Hopefully he'll also remember the other key lessons acquired this week: wear glasses, and when reversing, it's helpful to look behind you.

You may notice that I haven't referred to this bored teenager as the Boy. The Boy is no more. I learnt a new word: bonusbarn, meaning stepchild; literally, because a stepchild is one you get for free when you marry. So Bonusbarn he will be from now on.

Two out of three of us had a lovely, quiet, peaceful week: absence of internet is a blessing if correctly viewed, rather than the curse the third of us seemed to take it as. And even he enjoyed it more than he will admit. The weather was bright and sunny, with a cold dry wind: infinitely better than the grey cloud and drizzle I see outside now.

And I grew a beard, but this really requires a post of its own.

A week in Sweden by category

Transport
Here’s how it started. Many years ago – four to be precise – I drove the woman who was to become Best Beloved and the Boy, who was then and still is a boy, to Gloucester Green at 1 a.m. so they could catch the coach to London Stansted for their annual holiday in Sweden. Over the next fortnight I realised how much I missed her, how much I enjoyed writing to her, how much I enjoyed getting postcards ... and the next year I too was on the dawn flight from Stansted.

We don’t do that anymore. We now drive ourselves to Stansted at 1 a.m. It means we’re practically delirious from sleep deprivation by the time we reach our destination 12 hours later but it’s nicer than Gloucester Green in the small hours. Mind you, if you started a list headed “Things that are nicer than Gloucester Green in the small hours” then several trees would have to die to provide the paper to finish it.

Things have changed at the other end too. Used to be public transport all the way. Last year for the first time we flew to Gothenburg (Göteborg to the Swedes, but I bet you can’t guess how they pronounce it*), a train for the 200 km to Skövde (same bet with big brass knobs on**) and then hired a car. This year we hired the car at Gothenburg and drove the rest of the way. Avis upgraded our order at no extra cost to a Toyota Avensis, an over-engineered two litre behemoth with even bigger blind spots than a Vectra. I don’t think I hit anything but it’s impossible to tell when A4 wing mirrors and headrests impede your line of sight at every angle, giving you slightly less all round vision than a tank driver.

Still, I warmed to the vehicle as the week drew on. I still think self-regulating rear-view mirrors that sense when you’re being dazzled and turn themselves down are a tad unnecessary, but I became a convert to the joys of self-regulating windscreen wipers, and in particular cruise control.

* Yurterboy
** Hwevder

Home sweet home
This is home – a farmhouse on the plain between lakes Vanern and Vattern.

Turn around and you get this.



It is lived in by a mad one-legged Viking in his early eighties who trundles around the house in his wheelchair, has never been known to have an unshared thought (about which he will rant at length in Swedish), and who likes to demonstrate to his grandson how he gets into bed naked. I refer to my father in law.

Shortly after we first met, Morfar Hugo ran his moped into a car (which did everything it could to avoid the collision, short of going into reverse) and ended up in a ditch with a broken rib and pierced lung. After we had met for the second time, circulation problems meant he had to have his leg removed (with an epidural, not a general). He could have been forgiven for not wanting to meet me a third time last year, but maybe he was mellowed by the fact that I had just married his daughter.

So, he’s still alive and well, and still able (thanks to being built like several varieties of small brick outbuildings, and also to Sweden’s excellent social services) to live on the farm that has been in the family for generations and be master with dignity of his own house. I have the deepest love and admiration for him, and I really should learn Swedish so we can understand each other. For all I know he calls me the English Git, but I don’t believe it’s so. (Actually he calls me Ben-ya-meen.)

Morfar is simply a contraction of “mother’s father”. The Swedes have similar terms for all the permutations of grandparent, uncle and aunt – mother’s mother, father’s father, father’s sister, mother’s brother etc – so you always know exactly where the relationship lies. It’s a language of fiendish intricacy.


Church
Good Friday in Sweden is Långfredag – Long Friday. I have no idea what they call The Long Good Friday if it’s ever shown there. The Even Longer Friday? The Already Long Friday that was Slightly Longer than Usual? Best Beloved hasn’t seen it, so can’t comment.

Anyway, to church on Maundy Thursday and on Sunday. I could vaguely follow the Bible readings, though I got a bit lost on Thursday when I could tell the reading was an altercation between Jesus and Peter, but somehow got it into my head that it was the “three times you shall deny me” bit. It was of course Jesus trying to wash Peter’s feet, which makes a lot more sense in the Last Supper context. I managed better on Sunday, if only because I took my phone which has the full NIV text with me.

The first service was led by Eva, the minister who conducted our Swedish wedding. She sat out the latter in the congregation, sporting a black leather jacket and yellow pashmina combination that our own minister could never get away with.

The Boy wondered how I could enjoy a service if it’s in Swedish, thus completely missing the point – it’s not the language, it’s the fact of fellowship with Christians from around the world, marking respectively Jesus’s last night alive and first day alive (again). It’s at Easter that I always feel so terribly proud of my saviour. And it doesn’t matter where you are in the world – on Easter Day you can still announce “Uppstånding är Jesus!”

I told you it’s a fiendish language.

(There is something purely Pratchett about the fact that “andon” can mean either spirit or duck, depending on intonation and context. This becomes more and more relevant as Pentecost approaches.)


Food
Strangely, I didn’t have any rollmop this time, which is a shame because it’s a lot nicer than pickled herring ought to be. On arrival we were brought back from our sleepless daze by a slapup meal of Swedish pancakes and ring sausage. Swedish pancakes are Morfar's signature dish, the third state of matter between Shrove Tuesday pancakes and Yorkshire pudding, mixed up with bits of bacon and baked in an oven. Ring sausage is ... I’m not quite sure, but it was like someone had rolled up a lump of pure gammon and roasted it.

On Easter Day we ate a traditional Easter feast of meatballs, sausages and Jansson’s Temptation, a totally yum fish and potato dish. Throughout the week, vegetable accompaniment (if any) was boiled potato and carrots of broccoli. You probably can be a vegetarian in Sweden’s farming community and still have a healthily balanced diet, but you would need to work hard at it.

The Swedes have a traditional Easter drink called påskmust – malted (apparently), dark and fizzy like Coke, tastes like Irn Bru. Neither of these last two are bad things in my opinion but they do both rather militate against the “traditional” bit.


Nature
Every spring time, hundreds of thousands of cranes stop off at Lake Hornborga and obligingly perform a crane dance. Very decent of them, I say. According to signs, the birds are individually counted through binoculars each day. Strangely, the daily tallies posted were all multiples of 500, suggesting that cranes are very organised birds. It was 12,500 the day we were there.



The Swedes call it trandansen. They pair off and strut about, twine necks, jump into the air and hover, all to get a mate. Much like humans, except possibly the hovering in the air bit. We only saw isolated couples among the thousands doing the dance, but apparently you can see the whole crowd get started which is a truly awesome sight.

They are amazing birds - big, ungainly and also graceful. They are avian 747s. It was the first time I could swear I've seen a bird coming in to land and thinking: "flaps, undercarriage, throttle back a bit ..." Even without the dancing, just watching 12,500 cranes chat, fly about, do a little dancing and generally going about their business etc is pretty cool. You can watch for hours, lost in trandansental meditation.

Then Tiveden, a national park a bit further north. The guidebook says it contains mountains. In terms of elevation they’re more like hills but really they’re boulders left by the glaciers – some the size of a football, some the size of St Paul’s. It’s primeval Nordic landscape where the path scrambles up the side of jumbles of boulders, round the edges of dark brooding lakes and down into ravines where the sun never reaches the ground and the puddles still have ice. The ground is a mixture of bog and every pine needle in creation, held together by tree roots like steel cables. And pine trees. Pine trees everywhere. This is the kind of place where you can believe in trolls.




Cooking and cleaning
-is all that this sign means. I’ve no idea why the Boy should find it funny.



A load of pants
Swedes are heavily into recycling. Most supermarkets have an automated facility where you can return empty cans and bottles, and get your deposit back. The deposit is called the pant, so you take your empties to the Pantstation and use a machine called a Repant Universal. Sadly, I never had my camera to prove this assertion, but trust me. Also trust me that this is the end of the schoolboy sniggering.


Weather
Sweden is still in winter mode – the cars have their snow tyres, the B-roads are lined with snow poles to show where the edges are – but for the most part it was sunny and bright with a crisp, cutting wind and no snow anywhere. Dress for going out: a good thick coat and sunglasses. In short, lovely. I’m used to Sweden, or at least to Västergötland in the summer, when that fertile plain of farmland has come into its own and every manner of living thing is scrambling up out of the earth. This was the first time I’ve seen it with trees and bushes bare of leaves, and the grass brown and patchy. For the first time I could appreciate that Morfar’s farm is a little house on a very big prairie.

Then, Easter evening it actually snowed. And you know what? No one cared! Well, no one except the Boy who could finally entertain himself at an appropriate level.





I love a country that is grown up about snow. Two inches? So what! Close the schools?? Give me a break! Come the morning the roads were bone dry and free of slush. I don’t know where it all went but it wasn’t into dirty salty puddles that make your car filthy and rusty.

I love Sweden.