I spent last week rushing around Sweden, mostly to places I had lived in or visited before, as part of a Radio Four Crossing Continents programme which will go out in early September. The rest of the series is full of dramatic politics
, but you won’t find those in Sweden at the best of times, and certainly not in late July when the entire country has more or less shut down. So we have elk carcasses, fiddle music, and sociologists explaining the term of art that is Fucking Åmål Syndrome.Perhaps the most important discovery is that two weeks dead adolescent elk, with a stomach cavity that looks like a heaving risotto of maggots, actually smells worse than the air freshener in a Saffron Walden minicab. Further research is needed to establish whether I would rather share the taxi with an elk that has only been dead for a week.