It's 40 years since the Summer of Love. I was too young to be in it, but those hippy-dippy times still drift across the consciousness of the generations like a purple haze. But though San Franciscans may not be wearing flowers in their hair any more, you can still find eternal summer, wind in your hair, stress-free living and beautiful people on the west coast.
Not of California, though, but Sweden.
True, it's hard to imagine the Mamas and the Papas singing "Gothenburg Dreamin'" or the Beach Boys doing "I wish they all could be Kungälv Municipality Girls". The true sound of west Sweden, in fact, is a gravel-voiced poet and singer of sea shanties called Evert Taube, who died in 1976 at the age of 85. Not your typical rock'n'roll casualty, then. But, leaving the contribution to popular Western culture aside, everything the hippies thought they'd found in a blissed-out California summer is here in the endless Baltic days of July. And everything that spoils an English summer - radios, lawnmowers, road rage, boy racers, smog, sunburn, wasps, burger vans - is absent. Oh, and the weather is great.
The first day of the summer holidays is an exodus day all over Europe, but I've never seen one quite like the one in Gothenburg. The families have packed up their belongings and children and jostle in one chaotic jam: there must be 20 or 30 lanes of traffic, hardly moving. There's no obvious order, and just one sense of direction: out of town. Here, the roads are perfectly calm and quiet. This is the scene in the harbour: everyone with a boat - an appreciable part of the city population - seems to be heading up the coast in one swaying great white flotilla on the piercing blue water. One of Bergman's gloomier films (and his is not a cheery oeuvre), Hamnstad (Port of Call), was set around Gothenburg Harbour. Movie tourism is a big trend now, but you'd have to work pretty hard to come here and feel the depression, guilt, alienation and bitterness that pervade the film.
The Saab convertible I've just picked up is the same piercing blue as the water in the harbour, and the top is down. You don't absolutely need a Saab convertible to enjoy the west coast of Sweden in summer but, just as a Corvette is built for those swaggering Californian roads, so the Saab looks spiritually at home here. Every chimney and kerb, every brick and blade of grass seems to have come straight from a blueprint. Even the industrial estates look as if they've won design awards, with the petrol stations short-listed at the very least.
I'm staying at the Quality Hotel 11 (+46 31 779 11 11; hotel11.com) across the bay in Maskingatan. The last time I looked, Quality was a mass-market US chain with the design pretensions of a shopping mall. Not the Swedish west-coast version. This one is a converted warehouse overlooking a garden suburb on one side and an archipelago on the other. Inside, there are wooden and glass walkways and rooms with porthole windows and the kind of furniture you see in contemporary design museums. It's also handily placed across the bay from the best seafood restaurant in these parts, Sjömagasinet.
The restaurant is packed with well-heeled Gothenburgers enjoying a last night in their Armani and Agnès b before they go off for long days in striped T-shirts and deck shoes. We're sitting on a bleached wood deck perched over a marina under a suspension bridge. And a huge problem with Swedish summertime dining presents itself. As the sun sinks it hits you full in the face with a northern intensity that turns the rest of the world black. I spend the meal squinting through sunglasses and groping for ice-cold sherry, celery pannacotta with cod's roe, angler fish and lobster in a Champagne sauce. The glare-enforced blindness helps focus the senses on a meal that was every bit as exquisite and pure as it sounds. The summer sun here doesn't give up easily: after dinner, at 10.30pm, with the sky still a colour that can only be described as blue, the rays retreat below the tree line and into the glass frontages of the offices and flats that dot the strand, and make themselves rosy and cosy before reluctantly calling it a night.
If you've read this far, and the overwhelming clean, fresh, Scandinavian perfection I'm depicting is starting to make you nauseous, you'd better stop now. It gets worse.
