What I Did on my Summer Vacation

The house where we stayed on vacation the week before last was large enough that one room, on the ground floor, between the dining-room and the entrance-hall, was set aside as a bar. This room had tartan wallpaper and housed three striking taxidermical specimens: a deer’s head trophy; a large, stuffed bird-of-prey perched on the bar itself; and what appeared to be a genuine bear-skin rug. The taxidermy continued in an adjoining room, the one between the kitchen and the main lounge, where another trophy was on display, this time a boar’s head. More curious still was the ‘kitten shrine’ in the corner of an upstairs landing. Here, three stuffed kittens had been arrayed, a silent litter, on the floor in front of a mirror.

The house, we read, had originally been built in the seventeenth centuury. It was beautifully-decorated throughout: and some of the guest bedrooms had been deliberately ‘themed.’ For example, there was a ‘Venetian room,’ with carnival masks and framed, antique prints hanging on its deep red walls, and a vintage upright typewriter standing on the desk. Of the many eye-catching details, perhaps the most spectacular (barring the stuffed animals) was the powder-blue Vespa scooter posed in the main lounge. The gardens were suitably extensive, and there was a large outdoor swimming-pool—quite an extravagance at a latitude on the wrong side of 59° North—and also a full-size tennis-court.

While exploring the house on the day of our arrival, I found my way, past the first-floor guest bathroom, to a staircase at the opposite end of the house to the one where we had entered. Ascending this I was surprised to find myself in yet another suite of rooms, and further dismayed when a German lady approached me and introduced herself as the tenant of the house’s attic apartment, whose existence the house’s owner had neglected to mention to us. Embarrassed at having inadvertently wandered into someone else’s home, I made a quick exit, and later joked that I was reluctant to explore the basement, lest I should discover another family living down there…

Before the vacation, I’d had vague plans to set aside a day for some leisurely shopping in Stockholm, and to find time to check out the historic sights (and the bookstores) in Uppsala. And I was very keen to visit Skoklosters Slott, a nearby stately-home-turned-museum, where a certain painting was on display that I’d wanted to see. As it happened, I found myself more than content to spend most of my time lounging around the house or the pool with my wife and my mother & her boyfriend, and my sister & her husband and daughters, and our dog. And I made sure to spend a while swinging in the hammock suspended from two sturdy boughs of a horse-chestnut tree.

Anyone who wants to be further bored by my accounts of previous years’ vacations can find them here. I took the four photographs above, and five of those that follow below the fold. The shots of the horses, the dining-room, and the Vespa, were taken by my brother-in-law Mr. A____, and the last picture, of me in my Montecristi Fedora, was taken by my mother.

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