Europe @ 2.4 km/h (11 page)

Sveriges Järnväg (universally known as SJ) is efficient, I’ll grant that. Any desire to assist passengers is bred out of its staff early. But Melissa is new to the service so she greets me from the platform, ‘Welcome to Stockholm’. Not to worry, she will probably receive after-hours counselling for this unnatural outburst of friendliness. But she and her more taciturn colleague blanch when I mention that my small mountain of luggage and I are bound for the metro, or
tunnelbana
, whose main station, T-Centralen, is connected by an underground walkway.

Melissa explains that a different operator — Storstockholms Lokaltrafik — runs the
tunnelbana
and SJ employees have no insurance liability if they should have an accident on SL premises. I plead, I beg, I must still get from one platform to the other. Could she not accompany me to the platform where I will (again) ask passengers to get me on board?

As her still silent colleague slinks off, Melissa — clinging to the remnants of this old-fashioned notion that she is there to serve the travelling public — ignores her explicit rules of engagement and escorts me to the urinous lift for my onward journey. During our descent she declares, ‘There are way too many rules’. Only last week her ‘superior’ called her into the office and ‘told me off for helping a passenger’.

‘What had you done?’ I asked, horrified.

‘I told a passenger, who had asked me for directions from the train station, how to get to the museum.’

‘And what was wrong with that?’

‘My supervisor said, “You’re here to give assistance for train things, not for other things”.’

This episode brings to mind Lyng Kolbein’s caution about Swedes’ ‘Germanic’ obedience to rules. Later this evening, at Zinkensdamm hostel — on Södermalm, one of the chain of islands that gives Stockholm so much of its charm — a receptionist who has dared to give me a towel for the shower after I responded coolly to the idea of renting it looks as though the sky may be about to fall in on him.

‘No one will be hurt by your act of kindness,’ I reassure him.

‘I hope not,’ he answers without conviction.

220-222 km

In Stockholm you’re constantly aware of being surrounded by the silvery sea. Indelible memories of Gamla Stan (Old Town) are stored up. This is a densely touristed quarter but was also a vital port for that great commercial combine of medieval times, the Hanseatic League, where Sweden began its rise to Great Power status.

Outside the imposing Kungliga Slottet (Royal Palace) I see the Changing of the Guard, impressive as these routines always are. You keep looking for someone to put a leg out of line, or miss a beat, but they never do. I am poised to go inside the Nobelmuseet, to explore the history of those famous prizes, when a dull unease grows into a pounding headache, and I realise I’m not up to more sightseeing today. On the way back ‘home’, in the underground walkway between the train and metro stations, I see the most amazing sight this evening rush hour. In the centre of the broad tunnel a ponytailed man in a business suit sits in the lotus position, eyes closed. No begging bowl, no placard. His silent statement speaks volumes: you can find peace amid the turmoil.

223 km

For 48 days I have pushed myself to the limits — personal ones, not just the Continent’s — two hours a day in all weathers. In seven weeks I’ve gone almost 5500 km, the equivalent of a return journey across Australia from south to north and back. The speedometer says I’ve only been doing 2.396 km/h — 2.4 km/h — but my body overrides it and tells me I must slow down the best way it knows: by contracting a fever. My temperature shoots up to 40 ºC, and there it will hover for the next five days.

225 km

This afternoon it begins to pour with rain (what else?). Though I’m not to know it, this will be the wettest summer on record in Europe north of the Alps. But my travel plans these days are affected more by my internal temperature than by external ones.

227 km

Hostel crowds and hotel patrons are worlds apart. Zinkensdamm provided a case in point, as my stay there coincided with that of visitors from several countries, in Sweden for Deaf Art Now, a convention of deaf cinematographers. It is a sub-genre of moviemaking I have never given much thought to — though I recall there was a hint of the latent power of deaf cinema in the part played by a member of the groom’s party in
Four Weddings and a Funeral
— but I’m keen to learn about these unique artists’ philosophies and insights.

My interviewees were a Frenchman and an American, and our conversations were conducted in writing. Jean Cedric Ménard, from the South of France but now domiciled in Réunion (lucky he), laughed at my opening jest that he wanted to bring back ‘the silent era’.

‘
Non
,’ he wrote definitively, ‘I am striving to translate the world of sound into something you can see.’ Jean Cedric has been deaf since birth so I can scarcely imagine how he envisages ‘the world of sound’. When this ambitious 31-year-old was a student at Paris’ Ecole de Beaux Arts, he used to watch films in the company of
entendants
(those who could hear) who would interpret for him. But what he aspires to — and by all account achieves with
créations
cinématiques
such as
Musique du Silence
— is very simple, moving and profound. He sums it up with a typically French sweeping statement,
‘C’est l’art pour moi qui est la liberté d’exprimer’
. (‘Art for me is freedom of expression.’)

Wayne Betts Jnr, five years younger than Jean Cedric, grew up in Massachusetts and now lives in Hollywood. He first realised he wanted to be in films — behind the camera — when he found that ‘instead of following the storyline I watched for the camerawork and editing technique’. His best work so far? ‘A short film —
Vital Signs
. It’s an experimental work to show that sign language is cinematic.’
⁸

229 km

I have just one more destination to visit in Norway — its capital, Oslo — but the raging fever means I will miss most of its ‘unmissable’ sights. Damn! After an all-night bus journey I embrace the refuge of Haraldsheim hostel 4 km out of the city centre at seven in the morning under a louring sky. I resemble a pharmacy on wheels, feel like death but not so warmed up, and manage to sleep most of the day.

A receptionist at the hostel is proof that Europe attracts those who cannot live without the ‘freedom of expression’ so dear to Jean Cedric Menard. Mohammed Abdelmaguid is a 60-year-old Egyptian journalist, clearly an intelligent and cultivated man. In August 1990 he interviewed Nelson Mandela. Today he lives in Oslo, a political refugee since something he wrote (he is coy about telling me what) offended President Hosni Mubarak. Living here lets him pursue his professional life without fear. Mohammed has a radio program, co-owns a bookshop and edits his own Arabic magazine.

Here is a ‘European value’ for those who doubt that such a thing exists. But does freedom of expression justify insulting someone’s most cherished beliefs? The ‘Danish cartoons’ controversy shows that the right to disagree — as did many in Europe who opposed the decision to publish them — can be an even more revered value.

232 km

So what did I see of Oslo? Far too little. The fever has killed my plans to visit Munchmuseet (to see
The Scream
, of course, restored since being recovered after its infamous theft in 1994); the Kon-Tiki Museum established by Thor Heyerdahl; and, on Bygdøy peninsula, the Viking Ship Museum where I would have pursued my exploration of the Norse impact on Europe. Not to mention thwarted all hope of eating rollmop herring (but there will be compensation for that before this chapter is over).

I did get to wander round downtown and hop on a wonderfully accessible Oslo tram or two, so all was not lost. On my way to the bus park, and thence to the west coast of Sweden, I remark how impressive Norway and Oslo are (they would be perfect if only this exorbitant nation could get its economy right). But taxi driver Simo, of Macedonian parentage, is no great fan. Echoing the judgement of my Iraqi barber, he dismisses it in a single line, ‘Cold country, cold people’. He may be right or wrong about the people but just now he is in factual error about the country. One day last week, Oslo was Europe’s hottest capital. Even today the temperature will soar into the low 20s. Now that’s a Nordic heatwave.

233 km

At the height of the fever I was delirious, now I’m just confused. What is this here Gothenburg? Why do the English, and we, use the German name for a Swedish city being run by Swedes and which those who live there know as Göteborg? This is not the same as calling Roma Rome, or Moskva Moscow — old-established English names for foreign cities. If the idea is to remind us of the Goths, why not call the place Gotham City? It’s not as though New York would object.

234 km

Janne, a lifelong resident of Gotham City, explains what that Norrland restaurateur meant when he called the Swedes mellow. They will go out of their way not to upset, alarm or disturb you, she tells me. But there are regional variations. ‘We say, elsewhere in Sweden when you hear a tingle you know it’s probably a little old lady on a bicycle. Here it means a 20 tonne train is bearing down on you and you must get off the track.’

Only a self-analytical Swede could lacerate her people in so disarming a manner as Jackie, a waitress in a local café, who tells me, ‘We Swedes are known to be boring. Just last week I asked an American who has lived in Sweden for three years, “What were your first impressions after you’d arrived?” and he said, “Charming. Very charming. And then, after about a week, boring.”’

236-237 km

The Storsjön monster may have got away from me but here in Gotham I have tracked the seldom sighted Swedish sense of humour to what is surely its last redoubt. Liseberg, which bills itself as ‘Scandinavia’s largest amusement park’ and, even more ominously, ‘the most fun in Scandinavia’, will make the perfect place to hide. With three million visitors a year, the park obviously has something going for it — but does it leave them laughing?

The first attraction I come to is the Polketten, a circular wooden dance floor on which seniors do-si-do and sashay their way around, watched by a three-piece band, the Sven-Gunnars. Tricked out in traditional garb, the drummer, accordionist and frontman alternating on sax and clarinet play anything from polkas to Swedish folk music. But it’s not them you come to see: quite literally, it’s the floor show.

Most of the couples appear to be entering their third age or preparing to leave it. It’s all too easy to believe that sweethearts who cooed to each other back in the 1930s or Forties ‘Save the last dance for me’ could be here tonight to fulfil their promise.

One couple are dressed up to the nines, he sporting once jet black, now silver-streaked, hair; she a frock featuring more floral creations than most botanical gardens. Now another couple whirl past. He is in a business suit, she in a black strapless number resembling a muumuu, most unbecoming an octogenarian.

Finally we see a matronly soul clasping her husband close, while his free hand clasps a metre-long tube of Toblerone. He doesn’t want to lose her, or the chocolate, and why should he?
Strictly Ballroom
could not hope to emulate this spectacle in a hundred years. OK, I’m laughing — but, I notice, these curious mellow Swedes are not.

Before leaving the park, I stare at the Vertical Death Drop and try to estimate the G-force its squealing riders — clustered around this scary rotating maypole — endure as it accelerates groundwards only to wimp out with a slight bounce near the end of the plunge. Yes, I decide, I would survive that. Congratulating myself on giving the matter such mature consideration, I allow the ride operators to lift me into the Death Drop seat but by now it’s too late for third thoughts. Anyway, as shrewd readers may have already guessed, I survive what was, in both senses of the word, a real rush.

243-244 km

On either side of the Kattegat — the body of water that separates Sweden from Denmark — I see a forest of white wind turbines. Symbolic of eco-conscious Europe, the wind turbine is one thing that unites these diverse peoples.

254 km

Skagen, the most northerly point of Denmark, pokes its straggly old finger, or rather its cuticle, between the Kattegat and Scandinavia’s North Sea exit, the Skagerrak. With a puff of black smoke from the Sandorman tractor cabin we’re off down the stony, sandy track that 2 km from here will bring us to the ‘tip of the nail’, Denmark’s northern extremity, or — as the tourist information officer smugly puts it — ‘the beginning of Europe’. She clearly couldn’t care less what the barbarians over the northern and eastern horizons might think of that description.

There’s something faintly Edwardian about watching a cluster of people gathered on a spit of land, huddling under umbrellas as they watch the two seas collide like sumo wrestlers.

255-262 km

Pushing back from the ‘beginning of Europe’ — a 7 km slog on a day when I will go a record distance, 12.9 km, under my own steam — I have no cover when the rain starts bucketing down. The further I go, the more I resemble a wet rat. When I get back to town I might take a bath to dry off, I am telling myself, when I run into a gentleman of 75 summers wearing a boater (never was headgear more aptly named).