BEER cost £5 a glass in our hotel. one of the seemingly endless quasi-Burlingtons which dot the cities of the world - gaudy hut characterless halls, which one can deplore to the sound of identical tinklins muzak chiming through invisible orifices.
Where do the bright lads who design modern hotels get their ideas from? Is there a manual called Burlington-Bliss - ten variations on an identical theme, all designed to confuse the poor, benighted foreigner as to where he actually is, the only real indicator being the prices at the bar?
Hotels are the true measure of the Americanisation of the world. Is there a hotel anywhere now where the staff do not respond to a thank you with a "You're welcome"?
Hotel schools everywhere are probably teaching their students to answer the phone by saying: "Sharon speaking, how may I help you?" You can hear Hilton hotelspeak in Paris, Galway, Dublin and most recently, in my case, Stockholm - the land of the £5 glasses of beer.
Good beer it is, too. The Swedes are like the rest of us - they are proud of their produce. And with reason, though they are half-resigned to foreigners plumping for a despised Heineken or Carlsberg. When you insist on a Swedish beer, they come as close to a simper as a Swede can manage, which is not very.
Hotel schools can come and go and may get us all chiming "How Can I Help You" and "You're Welcome" at the drop of a smorgesbord, hut they unlikely to change national character. The Swedes are thoroughly, thoroughly Swedish in manner, but surprisingly unSwedish in appearance.
Blissfully cold
Maybe it was the cold. Blessedly, blissfully cold, clear and dry and biting, the kind of cold which reaches into your lungs and cleanses them - though not poor old Myles's.
Poor old Myles arrived with a cold which was rapidly transformed by the combination of the brisk, near-Arctic air and the pernicious central heating of the hotel - better if it were turned off and we all wore furs - into a demonstration of pneumonic plague. His eyes developed a sad crust. He wheezed. His face appeared from a gap at the top of his body like a small puzzled animal, blinking and regretting this entire thing called existence.
But maybe Myles was not the only sufferer from the cold. All those reputedly magnificent Swedish blondes were as well, or maybe they were sunning themselves in The Gambia and getting leg-less. Anyway, not a stunning blonde in sight, apart from the knicker ads.
That's another thing you never hear about the Swedes - to judge from the young women pouting from the bus-shelter advertising boardings in skimpy knickers and tiny, well-filled brassieres, and from the enormous number of knicker-shops at almost every turn, one must suppose that the Swedes have a colossal interest in women's underwear.
I, myself, have not. Nor had Myles. He just wheezed liquidly and sighed like the last dinosaur doomed on its icefloe as night descended. Hut the Swedes are different. One imagines them solemnly and silently contemplating trunks and trunks of women's knickers through the long, long nights of a Stockholm winter. For in addition to an enthusiasm for lingerie which passeth all understanding, the Swedes regularly achieve levels of silence previously unrecorded in human communication.
One darkening afternoon - it was about 3 p.m. and night was pouring out of the crevices - we were walking down this enchanting little cobbled street, full of Victorian-type bookshops, cafes, delicatessens, and the odd score or two of knickershops, with hundreds of shoppers moving through the twilight, saying nothing. Nothing.
Funeral processions
People in clusters - friends, families - walked in silence, as if in a series of confused funeral processions. In an old cobbled square, full of Dutch-type 17th-century houses, traders sat in permanent-covered stalls selling sticks of sweets, gloves, cheap paintings - in complete silence.
Nothing was said. Nothing. No banter, no enquiries, no yawns, no shouts of exasperation. Here is a race of sentries, called to a duty of a perpetual and wordless vigil.
Across the silent city there was a single sound - Myles and his mucus.
But not beautiful sentries. Instead of the high-cheeked, flaxen gods and goddesses I had expected, Stockholm seemed to be populated by Russians with unsmiling faces full of badly packed bone.
One of our number - not Myles, as he had returned snuffling to our quasi-Burlington, trailing clouds of germs like a bacterial crop-sprayer - suggested that it was the cold which banished the Swedish beauty. Come back in the summer and maybe from these faces, pinched and puffed and lumpy, would emerge a race of elegant Northlanders, graceful and fair and, probably, still silent.
With a huge wildlife population from its vast expanse of wilderness - Sweden is five times the size of Ireland, with only twice the population - and a genuine winter, Sweden seems immune to the silliness over furs which has infected more temperate, more cultivated zones. I was tempted to buy some furs, if merely to irritate people hack home, but our climate is too warm and moist.
Mere teasing
What you need to make the most of a fur is cold, the ironhard cold of the Gulf of Bothnia. For the first day of our visit, winter appeared poised on the verge of creativity. Snow was on the tip of its tongue - sometimes the odd flurry was conjured out of the cold, thin air, only to vanish again immediately afterwards. It appeared to be mere promise, mere teasing in the land of open gussets everywhere, hut the snow came on our last day.
Yes, the newspaper were right, snow was general all over Sweden. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Gulf of Bothnia and, farther eastwards, softly falling into the dark, mutinous Baltic waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Fury lay b..
Good God. What am I saying? Those long Swedish silences are clearly getting to me. But the snow did actually fall on our last morning, on the beautiful city of Stockholm and the dark waters on which it rests. And we ached with envy to live in a climate of real winters. And gussets. All except Myles. As we left for the airport, in his fever he found he had lost his passport - he curled up in a ball of mucus and died.