A spring week around the Sound

The 06:21 out of Stockholm Central was half empty and smelled of wet wool, which is what April smells like in this country if you press your nose to anything. I had a window seat, a thermos I had filled badly so it leaked into my bag, and four and a half hours ahead of me. Somewhere south of Norrkoping the landscape stopped pretending and simply flattened out. By Nassjo the sky had gone from grey to a sort of thin, scrubbed blue that I did not trust, and by Lund it was raining sideways. I want it on record that the forecast had said "mostly clear".

I came down for a week because I had been telling people for years that Skane was boring. This is the sort of opinion you form at nineteen, on a bus, in November, and then never revisit because it is convenient. Flat, I said. Farms and motorways and a bridge. My friend Jonas, who grew up outside Ystad, finally lost patience with me in February and said, go in April, go for a week, and if you still think it is boring I will pay for your ticket. He has not paid for my ticket. He is not going to have to.

Malmo first, three nights, in a small place near Mollevangstorget with a radiator that clanked like it was sending messages. Mornings I walked to the square and bought a kanelbulle from a bakery that opened at seven and had sold out of almost everything by nine. The woman behind the counter had a system: if you arrived after half eight she would look at you, look at the tray, and say "kardemumma" in a tone that closed the discussion. I ate cardamom buns for three days and did not complain once.

What surprised me about Malmo was how much of it faces water without making a fuss about it. You turn a corner in Vastra Hamnen and there is the Sound, wide and grey-green and moving, with the wind coming off it hard enough to make your eyes stream. Denmark sits on the other side looking close enough to walk to, which it is not, as I established by looking at a ferry timetable and doing arithmetic badly. On the second evening the clouds broke about twenty past seven and everything went that long low gold you only get this far north, when the sun takes forty minutes to do what it does in ten minutes further south. I stood on the breakwater with the camera and got cold and did not mind.

Lund on the Thursday, twenty minutes by train, and I made my first proper mistake of the trip: I assumed a university town in the middle of April would be quiet. It was not. It was the week before some exam period and every cafe was full of people looking hunted over laptops. I ended up eating a very good, very rushed lunch standing at a counter, shoulder to shoulder with two students arguing about whether a particular professor was strict or simply tired. I have thought about that distinction several times since.

The rapeseed was the thing I had not accounted for. I had imagined it as a postcard yellow, uniform, a bit vulgar. In reality, in the third week of April, most of the fields were only halfway there — green with yellow coming up through it, patchy, unfinished, and much better for it. Driving the coast road from Malmo down towards Falsterbo, you get these bands: the field, then the hedge, then a strip of sea, then sky, and the whole thing shifting every few minutes as the cloud moves. I stopped the car four times in eleven kilometres. The light was doing that restless spring thing where it is bright and then it is not, and you learn very quickly to stop composing carefully and just be ready.

On the train back from Ystad on Friday afternoon — the 14:22, which was six minutes late and apologised about it twice — I sat opposite a woman in her seventies with a canvas bag of rhubarb on the seat beside her. She asked, in English, whether I was photographing for work. I said no, for myself, badly. She laughed and said her husband had done the same for forty years and left three thousand slides that nobody has looked at.

Then she talked about the region, unprompted, in the way people do when they have been thinking about something for a long time and a stranger is a safe place to put it. She said when she was a girl this was farm country and nothing else, and everyone she knew left for Malmo or Copenhagen or further. Then the bridge opened and everything turned around: people started living here and working over there, house prices went strange, and the village she grew up in filled up with commuters who were pleasant and slightly absent. "It got richer," she said, "and quieter. I have not decided how I feel about it." She got off at Svedala and told me to eat the rhubarb season while it lasted.

I did, more or less. My last night I found a place in Malmo doing a rhubarb thing with cream that I would happily have paid twice for, and I sat outside under a heater because the wind was still going and Swedes will sit outside in a gale on principle once the calendar says April.

So: I was wrong. Not slightly wrong, wrong in a lazy way, which is worse. Skane is not dramatic and it does not want to be — there is no mountain, nothing to point at, no single view that does the work for you. What it has is a week's worth of small changes in light over land that gives you nothing to hide behind. That turns out to be plenty. I am going back in June, when the yellow is finished and, I am told, faintly ridiculous.