Yet a serpent slithered into this Eden, in the unlikely form of The Spectator. His father had gifted him a subscription, and he tried his luck selling an article about Sweden. It was printed, and soon he was filing regular dispatches while living in a bungalow in the middle of the forest, wandering barefoot in summer. Fatally, he came for lunch at our Doughty Street office and liked the staff (‘all quick-witted and, after lunchtime, drunk’). The journalism bug had bitten, hard.

Within a year he was in London pursuing a writing career, without his wife or son. His Swedish ideal was supplanted by a new love of London, a city which he said ‘filled all horizons’. He found an English wife, and started to view Sweden with the objectivity of an ex-lover. On his later journeys, he finds all manner of fault with it — from the presence of McDonalds to drunkenness. Work, he notes mournfully, had become ‘something done with keyboards instead of nail guns’.

It is as if he expected time to stand still in Sweden, and for it to become some kind of 1970s Brigadoon. Sweden modernised (and deindustrialised) at pretty much the same speed as the rest of Europe and is no more, nor less, corrupted. The most popular baby name in Malmo may well be ‘Mohammed’, as he says, but the same is now true for all of England. And Swedishness is still powerful enough that Kurdish-born women can be seen walking Stockholm’s streets looking like Swedes — with perfect skin, long hair and spitting out sachets of sucking tobacco.

It is precisely because Sweden was not ‘destroyed’, as Brown claims, that his book has its wonderful relevance. My Swedish wife declared him as perceptive as Bill Bryson — and, often, just as funny. His love-hate relationship yields a brilliant list of Sweden’s charms and frustrations. How its language is shaped by the cold, so that one spends as little time as possible with one’s tongue exposed. How even on wide, open roads its motorists keep to 55 mph. How to be expelled from the consensus there is ‘like being thrown out of a space station’.

Brown returned to Lapland to find the rural ideal he first loved: supermarkets stocking reindeer blood, men who ask him if it’s true that England gets dark at night in summer, and all the exotic fish you can cast a net at. Fishing in Utopia makes you more likely to visit Sweden, but less likely to emigrate there. If I ever see my old friends in Terminal 3 bound for Stockholm on a Friday evening, I shall be sure to give them a copy.

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