I’m writing to you from Malmö, Sweden, where the locals continue to be persistently and irritatingly attractive. It’s a bit like Cheltenham, where everyone is beautiful, but over here they’re not just beautiful, they’re enormous and beautiful. They block out sunlight with their shining beauty, and generally make Jenny and I feel repulsively hideous. Of course, I wouldn’t dare put myself on a par with Jenny in the beauty stakes, but such is the all-encompassing gorgeousness of Malmö residents that it makes us both feel like two medium-sized grey cuboids, slowly manoeuvring our way around town, failing to attract any attention other than occasionally getting in the bloody way.

We’re here to celebrate crayfish at the annual Malmö festival. It seems a strange way to salute the majesty of a river-dwelling creature: boiling it in beer with dill, sugar and salt, ripping it apart with your bare hands, noisily sucking at the carcass and picking off the edible bits with your teeth, all to an agreeable folk music soundtrack, but hey, when in Rome Malmö… Jenny’s status as knowledgeable freelance food writer gained us access to a VIP tent on stilts which overlooked the main square, where a couple of thousand of people sat wearing brightly coloured hats and bibs and chomping on crayfish.

You will notice a large stage in the picture above; shortly after this photo was taken a band whose name translated as “Gravel In Your Shoes” came on stage and played a number of rousing songs to accompany the slinging back of schnapps, or in our case some potent Malmö aquavit. The crowd became increasingly good-natured, linking arms and swaying backwards and forward in a friendly manner. But up in the VIP tent, the atmosphere wasn’t quite so convivial. A couple of snooty Belgian journalists had joined the six of us, who, up until that point, had been having a marvellous party, as Noel Gallagher once sang. They proceeded to sneer at the goings on, and whisper to each other while pointing and giggling at the rest of us. They reserved particularly intense giggling fits for me, which I found irritating, because as I’m sure you’re aware, I command a certain respect with my presence at a crayfish party. Anyway, they subsequently revealed themselves to be moronic racists with a grudge against everyone on the planet except each other, so that made it slightly easier to bear. They were the first to leave, and had the temerity to go around each one of us and plant a gentle, insincere Belgian kiss on each of our left cheeks. By coincidence, as they departed, a 23-piece Belgian mambo/samba act took to the stage, trying to bring the taste of Rio de Janiero to a small corner of Sweden, which might have worked splendidly, had it not started to piss it down with rain.

Yesterday we got up and went to pick up a hire car, which had been arranged for us in order to drive deep into the Swedish countryside. On arriving deep into the Swedish countryside, a man called Tommy was due to take us fishing, so we could get some first-hand experience of what it’s like to pluck crayfish from their natural habitat, and then pop them in boiling liquid. The hire car was a Ford Focus, a sleek, purring beast of a car (I know very little about cars) and having only driven a knackered Ford Fiesta in the past, it was something of an education. Particularly because I was sitting on the left, with my gearstick on the right, and having to drive on the right hand side of the road. I got used to it after 10 minutes or so – I only drove through one no-entry sign, not bad – and as we hurtled down Swedish country lanes, with me manfully taking charge of this powerful air-conditioned vehicle, it felt like I was in an advert, although in retrospect I think it was probably an advert for cat food.

We arrived at the lake and met Tommy, a manly hulk of a manly man, who explained that he had been up hunting for the past 36 hours, and that there were 4 dead stags in his shed. Jenny and I looked forward to being rowed out onto the lake for a gentle afternoon of fishing, which neither of us had ever done. Of course, we discovered pretty quickly that fishing for crayfish involves sticking some bait in a box, slinging it in the water and leaving it for several hours. So our fishing expedition actually involved wandering around the lake, checking the boxes for crayfish. We discovered three crayfish. The thing is, you see, there aren’t that many crayfish in Sweden; huge levels of consumption in the late 1800s led to restrictions on their fishing, and as a result there are nowhere near enough crayfish in Swedish waters to satisfy the needs of the population during the August festival. So the vast majority are flown in from Spain, Portugal and even China. So this, the most Swedish of festivals, actually celebrates imported produce. I suppose it’s bit like having a guava festival in Finchley.