Bergman in fashion

Mighty Ingmar, that is, the centenary of whose birth we celebrate next year, not wonderful Ingrid, though I'll give her a repeat look-in at the end here. The above image of one of Bergman's greatest leading ladies, Eva Dahlbeck, in Smiles of a Summer Night, was used in a colour ad to make me slaver at the prospect of Bergman à la mode at the Hallwyl Museum (Hallwylska museet).To be honest, I wasn't so sure about the mode bit, but anything about the master while I was in Stockholm for the HK Gruber festival at the Konserthuset had to be embraced.

The actuality, curated by set and costume designer Anna Bergman and Nils Harning, teacher of Costume/Props at Stockholm University of the Arts, exceeded my wildest dreams, even if the setting, No. 4 Hamngatan close to Dramaten, the National Theatre, is a fascinating but oppressive monument to often dubious bourgeois taste. It was built for Walther and Wilhelmina von Hallwyl between 1893 and 1898 to designs by Isak Gustaf Clason. The exterior is a fanciful combination of Venetian Late Gothic and Early Spanish Renaissance.

Admission to the main rooms on the first floor - I suppose one should say piano nobile - has been free ever since the Museum, bequeathed by the Hallwyls to the nation on condition that the rooms stayed the same, opened to the public in 1938. Should you begrudge paying 80 SEK for the bulk of the exhibition in the smaller, mostly unfurnished rooms on the second floor - and you'll see further down how that would be a false economy - you may still coo at the very first room you see, shrine to the Ekdahl family Christmas, if you love Fanny and Alexander anything like as much as I do (it's still my No. 1 favourite film). By the way, these are all my photos, with permission; the catalogue doesn't have pictures of the exhibition displays, and it's all in Swedish, otherwise I'd have bought it.

There are the maids' costumes, the one worn by Pernilla August (then Östergren) as the vivacious Maj in the centre; there, too, are the gowns for the ladies of the family (the one for Gunn Wållgren's Helena Ekdahl on the right, and for Mona Malm's Alma Ekdahl in the centre).

There, too, next to an Oscar, are Alexander's sailor suit and his teddy.

J actually met the original, Bertil Guve, at a Bergman Centenary launch in London which, regrettably, I didn't make. Very friendly chap, apparently, now an engineer, there with his real-life sister.Testified to Bergman's infinite kindness and consideration on and off set.

The table is laid as for that sumptuous Christmas.

The taste of the Hallwyls, though, is rather more fustily eclectic; as a distinguished actor, presumably with connections in the artistic world, Bergman's Helena favoured something more along the clean, bright lines of the Thielska Galleriet out near the farthermost tip of the Djurgården island, still my favourite building in Stockholm alongside the art deco Konserthuset. The big showoffy room in the Hallwylska has opulent tapestries, an impressive marble relief of Abraham and Isaac above a for-show-only fireplace

and a Steinway model C delivered in 1896. Doughty Wilhelmina wanted more than just the plain pearwood look, so she commissioned Clason to make a 'Baroque' parquetry case. Restored in 1990, the piano is in fine working order, they tell me.

The exhibition has two costumes from that vulgar mess Now About These Women, one of the few Bergman films I can't stand (because, unlike Smiles, it's not funny. I don't like The Silence either, but I don't dispute its finer points).

As for the paintings in the Hallwyl collection, there are few that show much imagination other than the portrait tucked away in the corner of Walter's smoking room.

Collections of pipes, porcelain and other fripperies didn't do it for me, but at least there are a few more objects of Bergmania scattered around the other piano nobile rooms, like this costume (there's jewellery too) from the austerely masterful The Virgin Spring,

and a model of Bergman's maternal grandmother's home in Uppsala as recreated for the Bille August-directed The Best Intentions.

Costumes from that are in the first room of the exhibition's paying part upstairs

alongside some of Bergman's own working clothes (men do get a look-in from time to time). Of course I love the jacket matched to angel wings,

echoing the treasurable photo of Bergman wearing those from the nativity scene of Fanny and Alexander.

Outside in the hallway there's jewellery worn by Ewa Fröling as Emilie Ekdahl, the mother of Fanny and Alexander.

The generous placard tells us that it symbolises security for the children - the only time Emilie doesn't wear it is when she goes to live with the 'bad father' Bishop - and quotes Fröling: 'I remember when I first saw the "dog-collar"...A piece of jewellery joined together by older pieces. Extremely beautiful'. There's more jewellery, the engagement brooch worn by Bergman's mother (on whom Emilie was partly modelled), placed together with a letter below the striking photo of the parents, not quite easy - just, in fact, as played by Samuel Fröler and Pernilla August in The Best Intentions.

Now we head to the heart of the earlier masterpieces - and, in the case of the black and white films there's the fascination of seeing the actual colours we had to imagine. Thus the dress worn by Bibi Andersson as the old professor's youthful crush in Wild Strawberries

and here's striking colour to match the flamboyance of Desiree Armfeldt, the captivating heart of Smiles of a Summer Night as unforgettably played by Eva Dahlbeck.

The room also has two other costumes. As the helpfully translated panels have it, the dress designer Mago - born Max Goldstein, fleeing to Sweden from Berlin 1938 - found 'a creative outlet for his weakness for 1950s silhouettes, where slender waists, ample breasts and shapely hips dominated. As a type of "master of glamour," Mago turned the film's turn of the century into 1950s couture'. As a result Margot Carlqvist's Countess Charlotte 'is draped in duchess and chiffon with an asymmetrical cut'.

To balance, there's the provocative innocence of Ulla Jacobsson's Anne Egerman (cf Sondheim's 'You must meet my wife').

Dahlbeck's red dress is first glimpsed from a very different room.

This is a little masterpiece of exhibition design - a red room with a white dress, Ingrid Thulin's in Cries and Whispers. It mirrors, of course, the essential design concept of that harrowing work of genius.

Creepiness rules in the corridor, as two alcoves give us the clown costume from Sawdust and Tinsel - telling us that Bergman was terrified of clowns, and that he thought white clowns 'mean' - and the God-puppet from Isak's shop of wonders, the 'fourth dimension' of Fanny and Alexander.

Pure enchantment, to the strains of the Christmas-tree decoration music in Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker, opened up in the recreation of the children's room upstairs at grandmother Ekdahl's in the same film.

And there, at the very centre, is the toy theatre with which Alexander is seen playing at the start of the film.

One sumptuous male costume gets a look-in - the kaftan of the caddish actor-seducer played by Hasse Ekman in Sawdust and Tinsel.

Opposite are two more gowns for Gunn Wållgren's Helena - I love that touching photo. Wållgren knew she was dying from cancer when she made the film, which surely gives her superb, still sensuous performance an extra pathos.

Death stalks the next room.

The deepest resonance in the film for me was when Alexander's father is dying and the boy, taken into the room, hides under the bed. It wasn't quite like that, visiting my dad on the last night of his life in hospital - in fact it was a lot worse - but I did identify with him. So I wasn't unflattered when two Swedish ladies told me, unprompted, I was Alexander. Fortunately I didn't exercise any powers on my stepfather, whom I was old enough to tolerate. Anyway, here's another nice composition - the boy's funeral suit, and a photo of young Ingmar similarly attired.

In an excellent final flourish, the corridor back to the staircase has a fine selection of Bergman's boyhood drawings.

No surprise that he already saw himself as a filmmaker at an early age.

Even this little collection would have been worth the price of admission. As it turned out, the whole exhibition was a thing of amazement to me. Oh, and just to give Ingrid Bergman a look-in - we must watch The Visit again some time soon - I take the liberty of repeating one of my all-time favourite magazine covers as symmetry to the Dahlbeck picture at the top.

Eight from the Gedda collection

I had an amazing, impression-packed three days in Stockholm: three stupendous concerts in the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic's HK Gruber festival (including the great man's definitive, legendary performance - conducting, singing, shouting, kazoo- and recorder-playing - of his ever-startling Frankenstein!!), a brilliantly staged production of the new, hit-and-miss Dracula opera by Victoria Borisova-Ollas and a vulgar, fun one of Turandot at the still-cultish Folkoperan, costumes from Bergman films brilliantly curated in the oppressive but fascinating Hallwylska (House-)Museum. But the biggest surprise was on a freezing Sunday morning when the square between the Scandic Haymarket Hotel where I was staying, formerly the Art Deco department store where Greta Garbo was discovered while working as a shop assistant,

and the Konserthuset, proudly proclaiming its star composer,

was transfigured from a fruit, flower and vegetable market - chanterelles very much the prominent items -

into a fleamarket.

Better than any I've encountered in the UK, its antiques were interesting, a print-stall led me to buy two illustrations from Lindman's 1920 Nordens Flora for less than £6 each - and then I discovered the records. First - on my way to a cash machine to pay for the prints - mixed boxes of LPs at about £1 each, where I snapped up Decca Phase 4 Ketelbey, Drottningholm Court music, an old Melodiya choral disc featuring Rimsky-Korsakov's Tatar Captivity, and this,

the great Gedda singing Swedish patriotic music including gems by Stenhammar and Alfven. Would that I'd discovered the real treasure house earlier. The boxes in question started with what must be the complete discography of the Serge Jaroff Don Cossacks Choir, progressed to a variety of tenors from Russian vintage via Caruso through to more recent contenders, hit a strand of HMV's old Viennese operetta recordings and ended with classic Swedish artists like Elisabeth Söderström. I asked the guy on the stall how much? He replied '30 kronor each'. I pointed out that what I'd already bought were only 10, he reduced it to 20. When, having made a selection, I asked again, he explained why these were more, launching his thunderbolt. This was the private collection of Nicolai Gedda, from his Stockholm apartment on Valhallavägen (his main home was in Switzerland, where he died on 8 January aged 91. A clip from the tribute programme to which I contributed on Radio 3 can still be heard here).

What, break up a treasury, fail to establish an archive? That seemed sad to me. But better that someone should make a selection who really loved the tenor and his wide-ranging artistry. And it turned out that the choice I'd made was actually quite representative. The DG Serge Jaroff LP I chose signalled the involvement of Gedda's adoptive father, Michail Ustinov (distantly related to Peter), who sang bass in the choir.

To be honest, listening was quite a shock - such comically terrible intonation, especially from basses trying for the low notes. But also such esprit and some fine solos. The back of the sleeve was annotated - Gretchaninoff's Credo has 'fakral' (farewell?) beside it, and 'God save thy people' 'Tchaiokvsky OBS'. This is the hymn arranged at the beginning of the 1812 Overture (and sung, in Karajan's recording, by the Serge Jaroff Choir).

There were so many volumes of tenors from Melodiya's 'The World's Leading Interpreters of Music' series, including Yershov and Sobinov. I chose the one dedicated to Nikolay Figner, since his history went back furthest: he created the role of Hermann in Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades, opposite his wife Medea as Lisa. The recordings date from 1901-2 and 1909, yet sound amazingly present - enough to tell that this was not a beautiful voice, at least when the tenor was in his early forties, but certainly one full of character, and one hears the heroics not in the Hermann aria but in Davidov's 'Away, away'.

Had to take a token of Gedda's great Swedish predecessor, Jussi Björling, especially as two weeks ago, searching 'Che gelida manina's for the Opera in Depth classes on La bohème, I found the ideal - not his later recording for Beecham (which overall is still THE classic), but one made with Nils Grevellius conducting in 1938. That's not on this LP, but other Grevellius-era recordings are, weirdly remastered with echo-chamber around them in 1961, the year after the troubled tenor's death at the age of 42 (a tear shed here, incidentally, for the news today of Dmitri Hvorostovsky's death from a brain tumour at 55).

I didn't realise Gedda's own debut recital came out as early as 1952. When I went into the BBC studios to record a Radio 3 tribute in January, the aria they played was Lensky's from this LP, with Alceo Galliera conducting the Philharmonia. So delicate, so feminine. The gutsiness came later, but Gedda never pushed like Björling, which is why we heard him singing so well at the age of 72 in the Golders Green Hippodrome (I reproduce the signed ticket on the blog here). The French arias are ravishing, too. This was my most treasurable find: on the inner sleeve is inscribed 'Dorogoi Mamochke, na (can't read the word), ot Koli, Chicago 26/4/1952'). Presumably dedicated to his adoptive mother Olga, his aunt. His real parents were Swedish and half-Russian. To know more about Gedda's humble and clearly not easy beginnings - after which he was swept from being a Stockholm bank clerk to overnight stardom in Adam's Le postillon de Longjumeau at the Royal Stockholm Opera - I've ordered up a second-hand copy of his autobiography, mercifully translated into English.

I could have chosen from the two LPS each of The Gypsy Baron, A Night in Venice and Wiener Blut as the operetta representative, but since it's closer to my heart I went for the excerpts - all that were recorded - from Richard Strauss's Arabella. Gedda features only very briefly in a scene from Act 2, and Schwarzkopf even in her younger days was predictably mannered and faux-girly as the heroine, soubrettish-sounding too. But the prizes here are the Philharmonia horns, presumably led by Dennis Brain, the Mandryka of Josef Metternich, a baritone I'd never paid much attention to before, and the pacy conducting of Lovro von Matačić - would that he had left us complete R Strauss rather than Lehár.

Had to have a specimen of Gedda singing Russian folk music with balalaikas. This is all good, but the two bell numbers at the end with a cappella support are especially magical. As for this,

which I selected before I know whose records these were, it's the original of a CD which has long been such a favourite at home. The CD only has four overlapping songs, including the consummate original version of Soloviev-Sedoy's 'Midnight in Moscow' seductively sung by Vladimir Troshin, and the extras on here include more surprises as to how jazz-oriented Soviet Russia could be in the late 1950s, not least with three guitarists playing the St Louis Blues. When I stayed in St Petersburg with the Romashovs, the grandmother, Elizavata, was fond of a radio station which played nothing but songs by Soloviev-Sedoy and his colleagues. I bet that no longer exists. Anyway, what superb arrangements and fine vocalists on this LP.

Well, you're spared further chronicles of further purchases because first, I had no Swedish notes left before I had to dash in to the afternoon concert, and second, I had reached the limit of what I could pack into my hand luggage. I had to look in two batches - about an hour into my first market browsing, I was heading towards hypothermia and was splendidly revived by fish soup with celery in the wonderfully old-fashioned (and extremely popular) Café Avenyn just down the hill. Which I returned to after the concert to take a breather before catching the Arlanda Express back to the airport, and indulged myself with the rich chocolate of a 'Sarah Bernhardt' (you can get these in the wonderful Bagariet in Covent Garden's Rose Street, too). It had been packed at lunchtime, by the way, a very lively scene, but this was 5pm on the same Sunday, so much quieter.

To scoop up more Geddaiana was so tempting - I now realise from reading how Gedda collected books on art, Russian art especially, that beautiful old volumes on another stall would have been his, too. Someone else was going through a box of letters, but didn't move on in time so I didn't get to see whether those were his as well. I repeat, how sad when the collection of a great person gets broken up and no archive is established. Heck, there ought to be a Gedda Museum in Stockholm. I hope a Swedish musician reads this and heads to the marketplace next Sunday - these mementos need an appreciative home. Anyway, I've done my bit. Watch this space for more on the Bergman exhibition, and The Arts Desk for both an overall Stockholm/Gruber piece as well as a transcription of a very emotional 65-minute interview generously granted by HKG.

A thinker at Waldemarsudde

I was here, at Prince Eugen's residence on the exquisite Stockholm island of Djurgården, in the course of a gusty but bracing and mostly blue-skied afternoon in early October before the formal business of the Birgit Nilsson Prize. Imagine my feeling of strong serendipity when, a couple of days later, I picked up my copy of Curzio Malaparte's Kaputt - second in my reverse-reading of his great semi-autobiographical novels about the horrors of the Second World War, and it's he who is my subject rather than the Rodin edition in Waldemarsudde's grounds - to find that his first chapter begins here, too. Malaparte described 'a clear September day of almost springlike softness. Autumn was already reddening the old trees of Oakhill'. Don't know what that is in Swedish; I'll make do with a slope in front of the villa, on the left one of several sculptures by the inescapable Carl Milles, whose legendary house and garden elsewhere in Stockholm I meant to blog about but never found the time.

Malaparte gives the names of sundry creatures to the six sections of novelistic reportage around his journalistic time at the Eastern Front and near the Arctic Circle, fraternising uneasily with the supposed enemy: 'The Horses', 'The Mice', 'The Dogs', 'The Birds', 'The Reindeer', 'The Flies'. I'm reminded of the sequences of animals going wild when the protagonist is cast out in Kozintsev's masterly film of King Lear. The connections aren't always instantly apparent, but Part One instantly places its subjects in Chapter One, 'Du côté de Guermantes': Prince Eugen identifies the 'sad, yearning wail' heard across Stockholm's harbour as coming from ' the horses of the Tivoli, the amusement park opposite the Skansen', being led down to a small beach by a girl in a yellow dress.

The sun was setting. For many months I had not seen a sunset. After the long northern summer, after the endless unbroken day without dawn or sunset, the sky at last began to fade above the woods, above the sea and the roofs of the city, and something like a shadow (it was perhaps only the shadow of a shadow) was gathering in the east. Little by little, night was being born, a night loving and delicate, and in the west, the sky was blazing above the woods and the lake, curling itself up within the glow of sunset like an oak leaf in the fragile light of autumn.

Amid the trees of the park, the two statues, Rodin's 'Penseur' and the 'Nike of Samothrace' wrought in excessively white marble [artistic licence, see above] made one think, in an unexpected and peremptory way, of the decadent and Parnassian fin-de-siècle Parisian taste that at Valdermarsudden seemed artificial and uneal against the background of that pale and delicate northern landscape [further licence here, this time on my part, with another Milles bronze in the formal garden and the linseed mill of 1785 in situ].

In the Chinese-box construction of Kaputt, Malaparte uses his conversations with Prince Eugen at Waldemarsudde as a frame for flashbacks to various scenes on Capri with Axel Munthe, in the Ukraine, on the Finnish side of Lake Ladoga. And this last offers the most astonishing literary image in the book. Malaparte would have us believe that the horses of the Soviet artillery, in desperate flight from a forest fire, ran into the lake, which froze on them.

On the following day, when the first ranger patrols, their hair singed, their faces blackened by smoke, cautiously stepped over the warm ashes in the charred forest and reached the lakeshore, a horrible and amazing sight met their eyes. The lake looked like a vast sheet of white marble on which rested hundreds upon hundreds of horses' heads. They appeared to have been chopped off cleanly with an axe. Only the heads stuck out of the crust of ice. And they were all facing the shore. The white flame of terror still burnt in their wide-open eyes. Close to the shore a tangle of wildly rearing horses rose from the prison of ice...During the dull days of the endless winter, towards noon, when a little faded light rains from the sky, Colonel Merikallio's soldiers used to go down to the lake and sit on the heads of the horses. They were like wooden horses on a merry-go-round. Tournez, tournez, bons chevaux de bois - turn, turn, good wooden horses. The scene might have been painted by Bosch. The wind through the black skeletons of the trees played a sweet, childish, sad music; the sheet of ice seemed to turn, as the horses of that macabre merry-go-round tossing their manes would curve to the sad tune of the sweet childish music.

Natually I went online in search of photographs of this extraordinary event. I should have known from my reading of Malaparte's The Skin: none exists of the catastrophe described. What I did find was a still from a Canadian film clearly indebted to the novelistic treatment of this phenomenon, which makes me want to see the work of  Guy Maddin in what he calls a 'docu-fantasia', My Winnipeg. His horses have escaped from a burning racetrack to the Red River.

The line between truth and fiction is more than usually blurred in Malaparte's work, as I found out reading The Skin, or more specifically the surrounding essays giving background. And here, in an afterword by Dan Hofstadter, I learned things I'd rather not know. Such as, for example, that Malaparte's distaste at hobnobbing with the banality of evil in the shape of Reichsminister Frank, the Nazi governor of Poland, meetings which govern the shape of his novel's second part just as Prince Eugene is the connecting thread of the first, may have been real, but his attitude to Frank originally had a very different slant. The original draft, according to Lino Pellegrini, praised Frank to the skies when it seemed that Germany would win the war; 'later, seeing how the wind was blowing, Malaparte rewrote the manuscript'. He was not present at the Iasi pogrom, which he describes so vividly and horrifyingly; he did not see for himself the ghettos of Poland.

Perversely, I'm still not convinced by Hofstadter's detonation. I want to know more. The books burst with a sense of savage indignation that can't be faked. Malaparte may have been an opportunist, but he was also a profound artist. Unfortunately, given the nature of the hybrid form, it's not entirely enough to say that art is one thing, life another.

What he leaves us in no doubt of is the scarring-for-life nature of the horrors he witnessed, and nobody sets them before us with a greater strangeness of literary style. How Kurt Vonnegut dealt with his witnessing of the bombing of Dresden - or not, since he was walled up in the depths of Slaughterhouse Five while the firestorm swept through the streets above him - is cause for amazement of quite a different sort. Here the language is not florid and evasive but short and sharp in its irony and matter of factness. I've just read Charles J Shields' very readable biography of the great man, and I sense that it doesn't take into sufficient account the shaping effect of this trauma - Vonnegut was set to shovelling charred corpses in the aftermath - on an ambivalent personality.

His famous motto, or - let's not get the two confused - that of a key character, 'Dammit, you've got to be kind', was not always carried out in practice, least of all on those who ought to have been his nearest and dearest. But that's the human condition for you: which of us has always lived up to our ideals? Milton's seminal line on Satan in Paradise Lost, 'comprehending the good, but powerless to be it', surely applies to most of us. It's an upsetting mystery how the hell Vonnegut ended up in a second marriage with a careerist piranha whom nobody quoted in the book seems to have liked (and the first Mrs Vonnegut, Jane Cox, who strikes me as both brilliant and profoundly supportive, would have been relatively fine about it if he'd taken up with an earlier long-term mistress whose humanity she didn't doubt).

The book left me feeling very heavy, above all because Vonnegut seemed so miserable in his personal circumstances during the years leading up to his death. But the artist's life's his work, and there he made so many others happy and decisive. I was going to add a few lines about his son Mark's second book, Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So, but I ended up disliking this in many ways admirable man as I never quite could Vonnegut himself, so all the wisdom I thought I'd imbibed went up in smoke - unfair, perhaps, but there it is.

Another book both bitter and sweet, on a less cosmic scale than Malaparte's epics, perhaps, but no less resonant, and relevant here because of the past's effect on the present, is Maxim Leo's Red Love: The Story of an East German Family. Translated (superbly, I'd guess) from the German by Shaun Whiteside, Leo's history is essentially that of five people. There's the author himself, growing up in the crumbling East German system only to feel oddly bereft of a country when the Wall comes down, at least for a while. His parents, a rather beautiful couple if not without their troubles, are the wistful Anne who wants to believe in the system and how it can be changed from within and handsome artist Wolf, the eternal rebel who ends up being a man without a cause. And then, central to the book in every way, there are the two grandfathers: Anne's father Gerhard and Wolf's father Werner.

Gerhard's life seems like a screenplay, a story of unbelievable courage and integrity ultimately betrayed by a system. Max takes his days in the French resistance from Gerhard's own writings, which read like an adventure story too astonishing to be true, one you could film almost unfilletted; and yet since he seems to have been a man of total truthfulness, one could hardly impugn his veracity. The son of a courageous Jewish father, he escaped to Paris, then had extraordinary adventures and narrow escapes as a fearless youth plunging headlong into his work with the French resistance. Werner, on the other hand, seems like a feather for each wind that blows - a kind of Everyman, I suppose, with unbelievable luck. He adapts to Nazi ideology and the world of the GDR equally well, if not without repression and retribution. Having given us the two stories, Leo links them eloquently:

I think that for both my grandfathers the GDR was a kind of dreamland, in which they could forget all the depressing things that had gone before. It was a new start, a chance to begin all over again. The persecution, the war, the imprisonment, all the terrible things that Gerhard and Werner had been through, could be buried under that huge pile of the past. From now on all that mattered was the future. And trauma turned to dream. The idea of building an anti-fascist state had a beneficial effect on both of them. Gerhard could devote himself to the illusion that GDR citizens were very different Germans from the ones that had once driven his family out of the country. And Werner could act as if he had always believed in Socialism. All wounds, all mistakes were forgotten and forgiven if you were willing to become part of this new society.

New faith for old suffering: that was the ideal behind the foundation of the GDR.

That is the explanation for the unbounded loyalty with which Gerhard and Werner were bound to that country until the bitter end. They could never unmask the great dream as a great lie because the lie they needed to live would have been exposed at the same time.

And their children? They were hurled into their fathers' dreamlands, and had to dream along whether they wanted to or not. They didn't know that founding ideal. And because they had nothing to overcome, nothing to hide, they found faith difficult too. They saw the poverty, he lies, the claustrophobia, the suspicion. And they heard their fathers' phrases as they raved about the future. Much of the power and the euphoria had gone. And the grandchildren? They were glad when it was all over. They didn't even have a guilty conscience at kicking the state. What did I get from the great dream? Small-minded prohibitions, petty principles and jeans that looked like elongated Youth Front shirts. The energy of the state had been used up in three generations. The GDR remained the country of old men, of the founding fathers, and their logic no longer made sense to anybody.

There you have it; I hope the passage was worth quoting in full. The troubles of the fathers invade the hopes of their children, and children's children, more than we like to think. Inherited disposition to depression, for instance, may be a myth: was it not because my grandfather was an invalid for the last 24 years of his life, after his mustard-gas poisoning in World War One, that my father succumbed to invalidism in his late 50s, during five crucial years of my development, leaving me to deal with my own improperly unleashed demons in mid-life, too? But this is another argument altogether, for which all I recommend is that you read Darian Leader's superb little study Strictly Bipolar. And so it goes...

Which is why I should take us out of the woods of melancholy Waldemarsudde, round the bay on the south (above and below), which was always my intention to complement the north-side routes we took to and from the fabulous Thielska Galleriet in the early spring.

and in to the fruitful heart of Djurgården. Large co-operatives grow fruit and vegetables in a huge clear space in the centre of the island where the sunflowers still grew

and autumn was in the leaves but not in the light

while vines and lavender were still themselves close to the pavilion.

Now we head into the depths of winter, but bright, cold days like today can still lift the spirit. Nature is merely conserving its energy, not dead. Of course you knew that, but I find it comforting to remind myself.