To Örebro, for the launch of the Spyker Formula 1 team’s new car. This city in middle Sweden is a strange and terrible place. Erika, my wife, is normally sensible enough to stay at home when I’m dragged away on these tedious junkets. But, keen to make a name for themselves in their first season in motor racing, Spyker offered us a ludicrous package of apparent luxury and excess to entice us to this Godforsaken place.
Judging by this debacle, the little-fancied Spyker will need all the luck they can find. The car launch was originally scheduled to take place in Barcelona, but the location had apparently been double-booked with an open-air performance by the Royal Spanish Ballet. Curiously, the management of the team chose to wine and dine the sports writers and hangers-on over a long weekend in Stockholm followed by a day in Örebro. I skipped the Stockholm part, taking the time to finish Lady Antonia Fraser’s excellent book on The Stuarts.
Chauffeur-driven from our home in Nacka, Erika and I arrived in Örebro shortly before lunchtime. The PR people had booked us a table at Fisk och Vin, apparently the closest one gets to haute cuisine in this city. More dry and tasteless a bream I’ve never had, while Erika’s monkfish was high on the monk and low on the fish. The wine list was poor: I settled on a 2001 South African Chardonnay, which left a sour, chilling aftertaste that shot through my mouth and down my vertebrae. You know you’re in trouble when the bottle is more distinguished than the wine. That old adage “it always tastes better when it’s free” is simply not true.
After a few well-chosen words with the restaurant manager, I joined Erika for a stroll around the comatose town centre, finding solace in my Montecristo Robosto. It’s not often that a Cuban cigar can lift one out of a deep depression, but on this occasion the Robosto did the trick. Of course, with the fascistic Swedish rules about smoking in restaurants, one can no longer enjoy the sumptuous post-dinner pick-me-up of a Remy Martin accompanied by a Montecristo or, at a push, a Hoyo de Monterrey. I have, however, been fortunate enough to discover a jolly little cigar shop tucked away in a corner on Kungsholmen. The proprietor, one Olof, has as good a stock as one can expect to find in Sweden. I’m suspicious as to whether everything he sells is legally sourced, but while the authorities continue their unappeasable assault on the right to enjoy oneself, good luck to Olof, say I.
The car launch itself was risible. One of the sponsors’ signs dropped off the car and the drivers gave feeble answers to the obtuse questions we posed. Fortunately, we were plied with enough superb Bollinger so as to numb the pain. I will confess to having overdone it somewhat; when I approached the drivers of the new F1 team I made a spectacular hash of their names and spilt half my flute of Grand Année all over the young Dutch racer’s sponsor-addled jumpsuit. The goody bags they give you on leaving these occasions are usually bland affairs, but since I recently discovered the wonders of blocket.se I am able to make a decent earner on the variously tacky perfumes, model replica cars, autographed twaddle and DVDs that are thrust into my direction as I make a timely escape from junkets.
Erika is a serial tourist and never one to take the afternoon off when she can spend it trudging around a 16th century shack or nouvelle art whorehouse. So I was forced to accompany her on a brief tour around the underwhelming castle and the pointless Wadköping, a recreation of an old Swedish town complete with wooden houses and other Skansen-type tat aimed at a moronic tourist populace unfortunate or foolish enough to find themselves in Örebro. Fortunately, the Bolly had worked its charm and I managed to inhabit a sort of champagne bubble, bouncing happily through the streets without too much fury boiling. The city’s dullness is penetrating, however, and impossible to ignore, for as hard as I tried to consider my forthcoming book on the life of Ethelred the Unready, former King of England who oversaw a massacre of Danes in 1002, Örebro’s tedium kept chipping at my brain.
Spyker laid on a journalists’ dinner that evening at the alleged five-star hotel they put us up in. The meal itself was not lurid, but the company most definitely was. I ran into Michael Desmond-Raymond, my former chief editor at The Telegraph. To my horror I discovered he had recently been made a Lord by some dullard-or-other in the British government, and was insisting on introducing himself to each and every Swede he met as “Lord Desmond-Raymond of Redcar”. Needless to say I kept my distance and regaled other guests with stories of his nickname in our Fleet Street days - “one marble”.
I met up with Glenn, a charming-enough sports hack from Dagens Nyheter, over a delectable brisket. Glenn is an old school, Bourbon-and-Dunhill sort of a journalist who has avoided the tidal wave of
political correctness which, among other notable elements of drivel, dictates that white wine is a suitable accompaniment for red meat. He told me about famous former inhabitants of Örebro, most of whom are far more interesting than the city they hail from. The tale of Engelbrekt Engelbrektsson caught my ear. A consummate statesman, Engelbrekt led a rebellion against one Eric of Pomerania, King of Sweden (and, in his time, King of Norway and Denmark, too). The moustachioed rebel Engelbrekt was assassinated in 1436. Political murders, it seems, have long held a place in the Swedish psyche.
Glenn notwithstanding, the trip was an unwelcome disruption to an otherwise pleasant start to 2007. I fear, however, that the dreaded gout has returned. Henry VIII’s disease-of-choice is hardly serious, but it is something of a pain in the neck having to return to London to see my physician once a month. I visited a Swedish doctor once, and found him so robotic and lacking in charm that I vowed never to go back. This health service automaton refused to make eye contact, and dished out pseudo-advice of the “trendy” generation of medics, for whom a piddling glass of Scotch is akin to rat poison.
Erika and I are taking a well-earned week in Valencia, after which we shall drop in to our house in Oxfordshire and enjoy a three-course served up by old ally Floyd. It will make a welcome break from plastic meatballs and weak tea.
