Travel Reference
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either complimentary or portable. This done, I ventured out into Gothenburg, still famished.
The rain was falling in sheets. I had thought I might stroll out towards the famous Liseberg Gardens, but
I got no more than a couple of hundred yards before I was turned back by the pitiless downpour. I trudged
back to the city centre and tried to have a look around the main shopping district, sprinting squelchily from
doorway to doorway and from one dripping awning to another, but it was hopeless. I wanted a restaurant,
one simple, wholesome restaurant, but there seemed to be none. I was soaked and shivering, and was
about to return in a desultory spirit to my hotel to take whatever food was offered there at whatever price,
when I noticed an indoor shopping centre and darted in, shaking myself out like a dog. The shops were
mostly dreary Woolworth's-type places and they were all shut, but there was a surprising number of people
wandering around, as if this were some kind of marvellous place to take an evening stroll. There were a lot
of young drunks staggering about too, most of them at that noisy and unattractive stage where they might
want to be your pal or pick a fight or just throw up on you, so I gave them a wide berth.
One of the more striking features of Sweden and Norway is how much public drunkenness there is. I
mean here you have two countries where you cannot buy a beer without taking out a bank loan, where
successive governments have done everything in their power to make drinking not worth the cost and effort,
and yet everywhere you go you see grossly intoxicated people - in stations, on park benches, in shopping
centres. I don't begin to understand it.
But then I don't begin to understand a lot of things about Sweden and Norway. It's as if they are
determined to squeeze all the pleasure out of life. They have the highest income-tax rates, the highest VAT
rates, the harshest drinking laws, the dreariest bars, the dullest restaurants, and television that's like two
weeks in Nebraska. Everything costs a fortune. Even the purchase of a bar of chocolate leaves you staring
in dismay at your change, and anything larger than that brings tears of pain to your eyes. It's bone-crackingly
cold in the winter and it does nothing but rain the rest of the year. The most fun thing to do in these countries
is walk around semi-darkened shopping centres after they have closed, looking in the windows of stores
selling wheelbarrows and plastic garden furniture at prices no one can afford.
On top of that, they have shackled themselves with some of the most inane and restrictive laws
imaginable, laws that leave you wondering what on earth they were thinking about. In Norway, for instance, it
is illegal for a barman to serve you a fresh drink until you have finished the previous one. Does that sound to
you like a matter that needs to be covered by legislation? It is also illegal in Norway for a bakery to bake
bread on a Saturday or Sunday. Well, thank God for that, say I. Think of the consequences if some ruthless
Norwegian baker tried to foist fresh bread on people at the weekend. But the most preposterous law of all,
a law so pointless as to scamper along the outer margins of the surreal, is the Swedish one that requires
motorists to drive with their headlights on during the daytime, even on the sunniest summer afternoon. I
would love to meet the guy who thought up that one. He must be head of the Department of Dreariness. It
wouldn't surprise me at all if on my next visit to Sweden all the pedestrians are wearing miners' lamps.
I ended up dining in a Pizza Hut in the basement of the shopping centre, the only customer in the place.
I had forgotten to bring anything to read with me, so I passed the time waiting for my pizza by staring
thoughtfully at the emptiness around me, sipping a glass of water and making up Scandinavian riddles -
Q. How many Swedes does it take to paint a wall?
A. Twenty-seven. One to do the painting and twenty-six to organize the spectators.
Q. What does a Norwegian do when he wants to get high?
A. He takes the filter off his cigarette.
Q. What is the quickest way in Sweden of getting the riot police to your house?
A. Don't take your library book back on time.
Q. There are two staples in the Swedish diet. One is the herring. What is the other?
A. The herring.
Q. How do you recognize a Norwegian on a Mediterranean beach?
A. He's the one in the snowshoes.
- and chuckling quietly in the semi-demented manner of someone who finds himself sitting alone in
damp clothes in an empty restaurant in a strange country waiting for a $25 pizza.
Afterwards, just to make an evening of it, I went to the station to purchase a ticket on the next morning's
