I am glad I have been out of the country for the last week of this game of Russian roulette. Europe has, sensibly, been more exercised by the European Cup, a much more appropriate expression of international cooperation and competition, nationalism without nastiness. It has produced some great moments of theatre, much better than recent World Cups, with even England managing to show some rare flashes of ability without the usual imperative of a new Maserati. Currently, my heart is with Iceland, plucky little buggers. But I didn’t realise Prince Harry was playing for Belgium, all the more surprising that he is their best player, albeit appearing as De Bruin, which I believe means Teddy Bear.

One of the delights of northern Sweden, with its forests and lakes, is that lupins grow wild on the roadside, a gay profusion of colour, where in England you more frequently see McDonalds cartons and Coke cans, as often jettisoned outside our home. Ironically, southern Sweden’s farmers have been seduced by the ghastly Yank corporations, allowing their green fields to be scarred by billboards advertising the nearest McDs or Burger King, fighting for market share among people with an immeasurably superior food culture.

A pleasure of this trip has been the steady improvement of food standards as I have travelled north. Whilst I had a very tasty traditional Hamburg dish of fried fish fillets in mustard sauce at the Fischerhaus, the fish being consumed by the locals at the next morning’s Fischmarkt was mostly fried and slapped in a bed roll. The food market in Copenhagen was of a much higher standard – and price – reflecting the Danish epicurean taste which has given the world Noma. Since that is one of the world’s top restaurants requiring booking months in advance, I had hoped to eat at their new no-book off-shoot 108, but sadly that is yet to open. The camp hotel receptionist noted “they are looking for kitchen staff”, but I said I wanted to eat, not cook. The confit of cockerel I had at the Madklubbin was an adequate substitute, though the advertised pickled rhubarb was notable by its absence.

Food took off in Stockholm, with an excellent pesto pasta with zucchini and mozzarella at Kultur for lunch, and a marvellous fish and seafood saffron stew at the improbably named Funkalistic. Sweden is also justly famous for its breads and cakes (konditorei), which I may have sampled excessively. The further north you go, the more firmly entrenched people seem to be in their culture.

I went to Uppsala for breakfast, but it was closed. No café in this sleepy little town opens before 10 am, and they seem astonished I expected anything else. I thought, what about the office workers, and then I saw them.

Having visited Norway a few times, I am used to this Scandi approach to work, which is much nearer to the work-life balance we enjoyed in the 1970s, with people sloping off halfway through the afternoon, and employers willing to wear a limited commitment. It certainly seems more attractive than the ruthless work culture which has evolved in the UK, with everyone hanging in the finger nail club. I am still unsure what this freakily  lifelike waxwork in the apse of Uppsala cathedral is supposed to convey, though.

These are the Swedish saints Lars, Erik and Olaf, easy to remember, because they spell LEO, the name of my third grandchild! I just hope he doesn’t lose his head.

Another Scandinavian development I have been enjoying is a new kind of budget hotel, halfway between the student hostel and the tourist trap, an IKEA approach to overnights. They provide small, perfectly designed en suite rooms at about half the price of the regular hotels. In Copenhagen I stayed in the very centrally located Cabinn City Hotel, whose rooms have clearly been designed by someone more used to seagoing cabins, and in Stockholm (qv), the hotel was run by the Swedish Tourist Board beside a park, a short bus-ride from the centre. Unlike the TravelLodge chain in the UK – which claims to do something similar, but merely  strips back existing hotels to poor levels of understaffing, while still charging whatever the market will bear – these are excellently run and have very helpful 24-hour receptions. By contrast, TravelLodge in Bath charged £100 for an indifferent room above a drunken bar which kept us awake half the night, then had the local refuse truck noisily decant the bottles at 6am. Their reception was generally deserted. The hotel in Stockholm also provided a well-equipped kitchen in which residents could prepare and eat their own meals, and computers. The only complaint I had was that they had installed those great toilet roll dispenser machines you find in shopping centres, where they suppose chavs will steal the toilet paper, hardly a prospect here. It also made a tight corner even less negotiable.

I am staying tonight in Mora, in a room looking out on the southern end of Lake Orsaslon, in a hotel which is really a sideline to the enormous campsite, Camp Mora, which is set amid woods beside the lake. Unlike Canvey Island, it is quiet and pleasant, despite some hairy bikers joining the otherwise middle-aged camper-vanners.

Mora’s most famous son is the 19^th century artist Anders Zorn, so I went visit his museum, containing not just his life’s work but a selection of his fabulous collection of Egyptian and Greco-Roman antiquities. He was obviously very successful, not least in Paris, London and New York as a portraitist, but his early watercolours, though highly accomplished, suggest the origins of chocolate box decoration. He started as a wood-carver, at which he was good, made some sculptures, and also showed promise at etching, in homage to Rembrandt, but I think his best work by far was his larger oils of local peasant life in his home town of Mora, for instance this telling scene of a wife waiting for her husband to wake from a drunken stupor at the Mora Fair, before she can go home. It has of course no parallel in one’s own home life.

This, appropriately, is Midnight, as witnessed in midsummer this far north, and as I am enjoying at this very moment in June.

And this is Mother and Daughter Bathing, as they were wont to do, though Zorn’s enjoyment of naked ladies, notably the fuller figured ones, came to undermine his reputation in the prudish culture of Edwardian times. His photos, etchings and pictures of naked bathing belles didn’t go down well with Protestant mores. I suspect it was a case of “Stop it, I like it”, the kind of self-flagellating denial which chimes all too well with what is going on in my benighted homeland this coming day. Arses the lot of them.