There is never a good time to visit Gamla Stan. More vile and loathsome a group of tourists one is hard-pushed to find in any of the great European capitals. Jostling for pavement space down the narrow streets and alleyways, festooned in garish yellows and greens, these guffawing imbeciles are precisely the kind who speed through an art gallery faster than my S-Type 3.0 litre on an open road, just so they can tell the folks back home they have seen a Picasso, Degas or Mondrian. I should make it explicitly clear that I am not a tourist, but a permanent resident. My wife, a native, had long ago said she would follow me on my numerous writerly travels around the planet, as long as I agreed to a retirement plan in her Nordic homeland. I was rather hoping for Tuscany, but Nacka it is.
Erika and I had been invited to an exhibition opening at one of the pokey, swelteringly-hot larders that pass for galleries in this city. On first glance, the artist, who shall remain nameless following the legal quagmire I left my previous media employers in, has a long way to go before reaching cruising altitude. But an opening does have its benefits: the chance to sup wine, chew on ludicrously small vol-au-vents and, in London at least, meet some genuine oddballs and idiots. On this occasion, the Argentinean Merlot was above-average, but the company was not.
I was cornered by a lugubrious fellow by the name of Håkan, an art critic for a newspaper or arts journal (I forget which, since his monotone lulled me into a sense of torpor, the like of which I had only experienced once before, on a trip to the cinema in the mid-80s to see The Goonies with my nephews). Erika, as is her custom, met infinitely more interesting people, including the Prime Minister’s Press Secretary, who had a tale or two to tell about Göran’s refrigerator.
I nodded politely at Håkan for about three minutes, before the boredom set firmly like cement around my brain. I wolfed down the Argentinean Merlot in a vain attempt to lose all focus on the man in front of me. The Swedish language is melodic, full of phonetic hills and valleys, not dissimilar in raw audiology to the delightful-if-ultimately-pointless Welsh tongue. Yet, for some inexplicable reason, when Swedes turn their attentions to English, they lose all variation in tone and become punishingly flat.
Erika encourages me to learn Swedish, but I repeatedly refuse. Far from being some kind of imperialistic philistine (I speak Spanish and French, following lengthy stints in Paraguay and Paris in the 1960s), I have developed a pragmatic approach to languages. There are those with a direct and clear global purpose, such as English, Spanish, Chinese and, much as we are loathe to admit it, French. Then there are those such as Swedish, which, rather like my ex-wife Theresa, takes an awful lot of work and offers very little reward. Everybody I meet in Sweden speaks fluent English, even if they send me to sleep while doing so.
I demanacled myself from the excruciating Håkan using the pretext of needing to ponder on the subtleties of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In reality, I slipped outside for a well-earned cigarette. It was seven thirty and the sun was still strong.
Back at the gallery, the artist made a sweaty-palmed speech in which he took an awfully long time to say nothing at all. My wife managed to find a few minutes to tear herself away from her Olympic mingling, and join me. Having listened to the art-babble, and suitably sweetened by the Argentinean Merlot, we studied the paintings more carefully. It would be unfair to call them diabolical, but it would not be putting too fine a point on it to say that an artist whose style feels like a clash between Mark Rothko and Claude Monet doesn’t leave me feeling delicieux, rather he leaves me gasping for more of the Argentinean Merlot. The organisers had run out, of course, and this being Sweden, there was no chance of sending an earnest, pimple-faced art youth or scullion to the cornershop in order to buy some emergency plonk. I put my foot down and insisted to Erika that we should leave. To my surprise, she was just as disappointed by the whole affair as I was.
We ate dinner at a mirthless Italian establishment on the East side of Gamla Stan. Had the waiters been any more laid-back, they would have fallen over. The lobster soup was taut but salty, and this is something I have noticed during my brief time in Sweden. Most regrettably, salty dishes are de rigeur in Stockholm eateries. Salt is, primarily, an accompaniment for eggs and potatoes. Pepper is the King David of seasoning, and it’s high time it got the credit it deserves. In my restaurant column for the Daily Telegraph in the late 1970s, I lauded the efforts of certain London restaurants to “pile on the pepper”. My friend and celebrated television chef Floyd was a keen supporter of my campaign to encourage the more liberal use of pepper. Sadly, our efforts were largely ignored by the gastronomati of the time, although it is with a mix of self-satisfaction and downright anger that I see today’s nouvelle vague of moronic television cooks freely hurling pepper in the direction of a filet de boeuf or a salmon mousse, with a smugness befitting the inventor of the wheel.
We rounded our meal off with a Rémy Martin and tiramisu. Back in England, I was always a firm believer in a sliding scale of gratuity: if the service was excellent, I gave a hearty 20%; if it was good, I would give an unimpeachable 15%; if it was passable, I donated a tempered 10%; and if I was treated with the same kind of indignity one would expect to find at a job centre, I gave nothing at all. This seems both fair and generous. In Sweden, I have yet to receive service that has dislodged my sliding scale from its ‘nothing at all’ position and this mirthless Italian establishment was no exception.
Erika and I are taking a well-earned fortnight in Brazil, after which we shall spend a few days at our house in Oxfordshire. We return to Sweden in early October, just in time for the beginning of winter. I proposed spending the frozen months in Tuscany, but Erika was adamant. “Besides,” she said, “Gamla Stan looks so pretty covered in snow.”
