To the Baltic with Bob by Griff Rhys Jones

Author:Griff Rhys Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141928135
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2005-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

26. Half Holiday

The vision of a timeless sandy interval on a laid-back paradise-island evaporated, as we squeezed into Visby harbour. There was a gap for us in the cacophonous boat-park, just up the end of the evil-smelling furthest leg of the marina. It was between a four-storey game-fishing boat, juddering as it pumped out the Bee Gees at full volume, and a chartered 40-foot Bavaria yacht (smothered in drying towels) playing Death Metal at slightly fuller volume.

Mary Wollstonecraft observed that the Scandinavians loved music. Indeed, no hamlet on our odyssey had seemed too small to host its own folk festival, usually featuring Peps Blom (a bloke with a big beard, round glasses and that peculiar look of fierce concentration needed for a tiny fret-board), but Visby was a Disco of Babel. There was an afternoon vibe, with fat, Swedish, rapping DJs, over on the quay. Continuous rockabilly ground out of the travelling fairground on the promenade. Several large motorboats posed as mobile groove-parties, where chubby boys, with no shirts and red gypsy bandannas, swung vigorously to the ‘Theme from Fame’. A short stumble down the pontoon, a group of wan girls jiggled about on an Alcopop Palace to extracts from Grease. I moored with a concentrated expression of peeved stoicism on my face.

‘Cool!’ Catherine said.

‘This looks all right,’ Bob agreed.

Just opposite the harbour was an Internet café. I climbed to the first floor, to the offices of a web design company, where Martin met me at the door. He was plump and middle-aged, and wore the sort of interesting footwear that marked him out as a cyber merchant. ‘I moved my whole business here from Stockholm,’ he explained. ‘We design web pages.’

‘For people in Gotland?’

‘No, no,’ he laughed. ‘For banks and businesses on the mainland. We don’t have to base ourselves anywhere, so we based ourselves here. It is a wonderful island.’ He was getting misty-eyed about Gotland. All Swedes were said to suffer from this affliction. Outside his open window, Elvis was crooning ‘Love Letters Straight from Your Heart’. Martin summoned a twenty-year-old with long hair, who looked at my mobile telephone and shook his head.

‘This is not really our line of business,’ he explained.

Martin furrowed his brow. ‘There is a shop in the new town. Can you find the number, Per? You know, these are some of the finest medieval walls in the whole of Northern Europe.’ I did know. I’d read the guide book. ‘The walls weren’t really built to keep foreigners out. They were built to keep the local population out. The sheep farmers!’ He waved vaguely in the direction of some imaginary yokels.

Sheep were still a big thing on Gotland. There were warehouses selling special Gotland sheepskins, a sort of tight astrakhan grey twist, made into everything from hats to extremely comfortable-looking bicycle saddle covers. (Mmm.) But the Hanseatic merchants had long gone, though Martin and his like had, in a sense, replaced them. ‘In their day, the boats came here laden with furs and made the merchants very rich,’ he said, with a slightly different misty look in his eye.

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