I've just been to Stockholm. Now, everyone, even the locals, said you should really come back in the summer when it's hot and everyone's in the water in boats and canoes and you can swim if you're fast and hardy. Even in the summer it's still the Baltic. And they all go to merry little islands in the archipelago and sweat and eat herring in a hundred different ways in the never-setting sun. And have saunas and spend their summer naked without ever staring at each other's reproductive bits. 'That's when you should come,' they said.
December is not yet white, but the sun is only let out, like a prisoner on death row, for a couple of hours. It's cold, and the wind whips off the water and ricochets through the narrow streets of the old town, eddying off the cobbles and buffeting doors and shutters.
But it's this pearly grey light and the sprightly coldness of the pewter sea and the occasional moments of pale golden sun slanting off the windows that make this city in a country of 14 bite-sized islands so enchanting in the sense of having caught it unaware, resting.
The place is at home with itself and the natives go about their pre-Christmas business with their collars up and their guards down.
This is an edited extract from AA Gill's Here & There: Collected Travel Writing (£12.99, Hardie Grant Books), published on 17 November. British Airways flies to Stockholm. Visit ba.com.
