Get yourself to Sweden – while you still can

An idea gains ground that we shouldn’t go abroad any more: that the very act of travelling without urgent reason is somehow irresponsible. I don’t subscribe to this. To me, travel has always been such an important and productive part of life, a source of knowledge and happiness. So while I can travel, I will.

But quarantine is making it harder. My partner and I belong to what one survey reports is the 18 per cent of quarantined people who actually do stay at home. Much as I love our Derbyshire home, 14 days quarantined in one corner of the Peak District is a serious deterrent from visiting most of the rest of the world.

But not from visiting Sweden, yet. As I write, their Covid case-rate is about a quarter of Britain’s, and our requirement to quarantine does not apply to people arriving from Stockholm. Nor do the Swedes make British visitors quarantine. So off we went on a four-day trip to a country very close to these islands, but which millions of us hardly know. True, I once spent a New Year in a log cabin in the woods in central Sweden: fun, but we saw only snow and trees. Otherwise my last visit was half a century ago. Since then I’ve felt I knew Sweden only by reputation.

That reputation proved so very wide of the mark. Call me ignorant (and I was) but my childish idea of the country was of a sort of frontier land: a few modest conurbations around Sweden’s Baltic and North Sea coast, and then vast swaths of coniferous nothingness punctuated by the occasional clapboard barn and some sweet little Lutheran churches, stretching up towards the North Pole. Culturally I’d (again ignorantly) supposed that apart from Strindberg, a playwright whose work I find impenetrable, and of course Abba… well, what else was there beyond Europe’s most successful purveyor of flatpack furniture? Politically I’d thought of Sweden as slightly sanctimonious, much into good work among the non-aligned and developing countries and ducking the big issues.