Last Saturday on the flight to Stockholm I sat next to a Finnish lady in her mid-sixties. I never took her name but we chatted in Swedish for much of the two hour flight. She lives in Nykvarn a few miles west of Södertälje…I looked it up on arrival as I thought I knew Stockholm County but could not place Nykvarn. Stockholm has continued to expand since I was part of the building industry providing the physical infrastructure for this expansion in the early 1970s.

There has been no overall growth in the Swedish population…although the immigrant population has been steadily increasing to its present ten percent…but there has been a continual movement of the population into Sweden’s three City Regions in the southern third of the country. This migration to the cities has happened since the 1930s despite massive and continuing public subsidies to the fir trees in the northern two-thirds of Sweden.

The largest of Sweden’s three city regions is Stockholm in the east of the country protected from marauding Russians by an archipelago of hundreds of tiny islands that shelters Stockholm from the Baltic and makes it a paradise for yachts and motor cruisers. Number Two is Göteborg in the west…with the Norwegian capital Oslo a few Swedish Miles to the north and Newcastle 24-hours away at the western end of the DFDS Water Trail across the North Sea.

The third significant city region is the former Danish city of Malmö in Skåne six hours away from Stockholm to the south and connected by the longest bridge in Europe to the Danish capital of Copenhagen. The medieval university town of Lund is a 20 minutes train journey away from Malmö so Malmö Centre will be an accommodation option.

My temporary Finnish companion and her husband had spent their adult lives in Sweden and although she spoke fluent in Swedish he had never learnt Swedish. She was in London for a month to visit one of their two daughters…an interior designer and college lecturer who speaks fluent English howbeit with a hybrid Swedish and London Home Counties accent. But her grandson…like most English children…had English as his only language.

The teaching of languages in English schools is so appalling that only university studies in a language…to the exclusion of everything else…produces fluency from within the education system. This is in sharp contrast to other countries in Europe where fluency in Foreign Languages is regarded as a basic right by the teachers and a rite of passage to a better world by the teachees. And fluency to a European does not mean the ability to say Manchester United in a foreign accent…too often the Englander’s interpretation of the idea of fluency in a language.

I picked up on my fellow traveller’s Finnish dialect almost immediately…within a sentence or two. This facility with accents is unusual for a non-Swedish native speaker. I was familiar with the Finnish accent in Swedish having spent time in the Baltic with Connie on a couple of occasions. We spoke English together but Connie was fluent in Swedish, Finnish and English…and her German was excellent and her French on a par with mine. Her family came from the 10% of Finns in the Swedish-speaking coastal regions of Finland…formerly part of the Old Swedish Empire. Sweden has dialects and it is easy to place Swedes geographically but they are not deviate like English dialects. Foreigners can go around for weeks in parts of England…like London…and hardly understand anything they hear.

Swedes flatter me that my Swedish is fluent…and it is true that I understand them. But I am not bilingual in the way my daughter is…this involves pronunciation too. My Swedish does not begin to compare with my English and my written and grammatical work would place me firmly in the bottom quartile of a Swedish high school class.

But also my Swedish cannot bear comparison with the English that Ingrid, Connie and Heidi have been taught and have learnt to speak and write. I never ceased to be amazed at the extent of their dexterity with the nuances of English…about which nineteen out of twenty English native-speakers are ignorant. And I would not be awarded good marks in any equivalent tests in Swedish to the Cambridge University Certificate of Proficiency in English in which they each distinguished themselves. Their exams were similar to the Use of English exams that replaced Compulsory Latin as a Cambridge entry requirement in the 1960s…taken by just a percent or two of English citizens.

The highest accolade for my Swedish came while waving farewell to a middle-age couple as they stepped off a train in Växjö. ‘It was so nice,’ they told me, ‘to pass the time of day chatting with someone from Norrland.’ Stockholmers roar with laughter when I tell them this story as it dovetails neatly with their stereotypes for both Norrlännings and Smålannings. But I was well chuffed…as they say in Oldham…because I had passed myself off as a Swede. I had broken out of my foreign ghetto and concealed my engelsk brytning…Swedish for an English accent.

Swedes call the Hjulsta line that I ride to Sundbyberg the Orient Express. The reason? It runs from the cafés in the City Centre beloved by Iranians, Turks, Ethiopian, Somalis and Kurds…and by me…to the main immigrant residential suburbs like Kista where Bill Gates has established his Swedish base camp…but more on my adventures on the Orient Express and my encounters with Microsoft…and the reasons for it…another day.