…all important ingredients for a Swedish midsummer. The first you eat, as they are or with cream or sugar or both, the second you put in your schnapps, to make it taste like medicine and therefore providing you with an even better excuse to drink it, and the third you, if you are a young girl, collect during the night. Yes, girls who want to dream about their future husband only have to collect seven different flowers, climb over seven fences and not utter a word in the process and their dreams will reveal all. I have never managed it; the flowers and the being silent is not a problem, finding adequate fences in a city, however, is.We had been invited by friends who had courageously set the table outside (under a roof), in bold defiance of the dark skies. It was the coldest day for a long time, which in a way is traditional. Heat will undoubtedly set in on Monday. These friends deal in art, and have it everywhere: on the walls of the patio and in the shed. In the house you can’t find the walls for paintings.
The host, a dominating presence at the best of times, greeted us with flowers on the head and a bottle of homemade schnapps, looking less like a hippie and more like the second coming of Puck or a faun in a suit. The guests were a mixed bunch, several generations, nationalities and languages. As the evening, and indeed the schnapps distribution, progressed, the three languages became more and more intertwined. We had the traditional food, but did not indulge in traditional dancing around a flower-clad pole. As no midsummer celebrations are complete without the handling of some phallic object, however, the men decided that the flagpole had to come down to be fixed. And that a hay fork might be useful in the process. The women immediately started talking about how lovely it is to put dried lavender in the linen cupboard and just like that we had restored the gender conventions of society. It may have been the wormwood.
By that time, the sun had decided to make an appearance after all and in the end, the most important thing about midsummer (and, indeed, summer) is strawberries. Of which there were plenty. Our American guest wondered if Swedish parties always comprise several eating sessions, and that was before the final session – coffee and raisin scones, baked by the Dutch guest. (At some point I will have to tell her that we even have traditions and terminology for the food you give the guests in the middle of the night, if the party goes on for that long.)
I had a few drops of cognac and with it an epiphany. (This blog is fast becoming Proustian.) Whisky is an acquired taste, one I spent some time acquiring and now have a profound love for. Cognac is also an acquired taste, and one that, until last summer, I simply hadn’t acquired. In many situations where cognac is an option, whisky is too. So I go for the whisky. Anyway. Last summer I happened to be given a bottle of cognac, and around the same time I had been persuaded it was imperative that I see The Office. The pain and squirming which previous attempts at watching The Office had generated had to be overcome and I suddenly came up with an incredibly cunning plan: I would combine the two projects. So I drank copious amounts of cognac and watched The Office with a marathon-like dedication until I liked them both. So far, so good. But because I haven’t had many other occasions to drink it since, the taste (even if this was a different, and for me new, kind) now immediately conjures up images of a certain workplace in Slough. My nose and its memory. What have I done?
I haven’t picked any flowers (even if I did come home with my bag full of lavender for some reason), but I certainly hope all this does not mean that I will dream about Ricky Gervais.
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