To be very honest I don't know why the Swedes or the Dutch need to translate books into their own languages because they can all speak and read English so well. But this isn't the kind of thing you'd say to nice Swedish publishers, especially when they invite you over to celebrate the launch of a book. You have to assume they know what they're doing.
They put us up in the Hotel Victory in the old part of Stockholm for the first night. I was too tired to read the back of the door and work out what it would have been in kroners, but I'd say plenty of them. The suites were all named after sea captains and contained some of their personal belongings. Our suite was called Captain Johannson and had a lot of his old family pictures and sea charts in it.
If I had the day to myself I'd have gone down to the water's edge and taken a two-hour Under the Bridges of Stockholm tour, and then maybe had a huge amount of herrings with different sauces on them and gone to the Cezanne exhibition. But instead I sat in the Captain Johannson Suite and talked about myself and my view of life to Swedish journalists, and since this is a topic dear to my heart I had a great time altogether.
Then I had some Pike and Perch, as it was described on the menu, with the Irish Ambassador Martin Burke, who had the latest news of election exit polls with him - which was great. Later I went down to a store called Ahlens for a book signing. I put lycka till (good luck) on each book to impress people, but they may have seen through me and realised that these were the only Swedish words I knew.
We then went out to a small airport where it looked as if half the country was on the move to places I had never heard of, and we flew to Gothenburg where there was a book fair.
The Hotel Gothia is a huge conference hotel, and the lobby was buzzing with people arriving and leaving and those who had stayed too long in the Skylounge the night before saying fairly unconvincingly that they were going to pace themselves and have an early night. People were arguing about whether Frederick Forsyth was marginally better looking than his photograph or marginally worse looking.
Two pencil-slim women were wondering if they should eat a whole open prawn sandwich each or share one. It would be the only food either of them would have for 24 hours. Wise to lay down a foundation for all that schnapps of course, but foolish to undo the work of months of selfdenial. It was almost impossible to know what was best.
I had a lot of happy talking about myself here too, which was delightful. I almost have withdrawal symptoms now when there's no line of pleasant people coming in and courteously asking my opinion about Ireland or women, or divorce or the future.
And sometimes I allowed them to tell me about their lives too, and their children and their jobs and their holiday chalets in wooded places where apparently they do a lot of climbing and walking. And none of them seemed boastful about the number of languages they spoke in effortless unaccented tones. They shrugged it off. Who speaks Swedish they ask, implying it was their duty to learn everyone else's language.
And there was a dinner in a very splendid place called the Royal Bachelors' Club of Skyttegatan. Apparently it has a less than honourable record in terms of equality of the sexes and there were a few liberal frowns over this. But the club, they assured us, was originally an English one, so all that kind of fustiness wasn't part of Swedish culture and we all cheered up again and blamed Britain for everything.
They had invited a band called Cajun Paddy, originally from Donegal, to play for us, and as all the Swedes at the dinner had some knowledge of Irish music as well as everything else, they were able to make requests. Something very few of us would be able to do in return if we met a Swedish band along the way.
Then at the weekend there was some time off, so we drove through the Christmas-tree woods and down the coast of south Sweden and had a huge Sunday lunch in a thatched house built by a young couple who were friends of the publishers.
It got dark as we sat there in the quiet countryside and ate roast lamb and pickled squash. It as the kind of place where everyone looked up and moved the curtains back when a car went by, since so few did.
They had a book on Irish thatched cottages and wanted to know was it desperately expensive to buy the materials to thatch your roof in Ireland. I hate to be stumped by things, so I said it was fairly pricey all right and had got more so over the years, which I thought was a reasonably safe answer.
Then we drove in the dark to a tiny place called Simrishamn which was gorgeous, and stayed in the Hotel Svea right on the harbour. It would be the kind of place you'd love in the summer for a seaside holiday.
A Swedish writer called Elsie Rydsjo lives there. She used to live in Ireland, and she and I were penfriends. She asked us all to brunch and we sat in her little house which had a garden about three houses away, because a previous owner had won somebody else's garden from them in a poker game. Elsie writes historical novels set in the 18th century and is immensely popular there.
I could have stayed there for a week, but it was time for Lund. It's a university town, filled with students cycling through the falling leaves and holding hands as they walk past the old mosscovered buildings. It was dead romantic and you'd imagine that a million Hollywood musicals should have been set there.
A very nice Cork woman who came to the book-signing asked me had I ever heard of Lund before going there. Heard of, yes, I said vaguely. She had never heard of it until she met a fellow from Lund and ended up marrying him and living there. It was a very nice place - cultured, gentle - but sometimes she wondered what would have happened if she'd met a fellow from Crosshaven like all her friends had. It was the kind of thing that would exercise your mind on a long Swedish night, she said.
The next day we took a ferry across to Denmark. The ferry was full of Swedes going to buy nice cheap Danish beer and bring it home for parties, they explained. There were busloads of them and the buses had a lot of storage space. They would stay in Denmark for only two hours, they said apologetically. I wasn't there much longer myself, since there was a direct flight from Copenhagen to Dublin.
Five nights in Sweden, four different hotels - aren't you exhausted, someone asked me. In fact no, it was marvellous, it was like a little unexpected winter holiday marred only by insane jealousy of people who can get their heads around other people's languages with apparently no difficulty at all.