The Bridge/Bron/Broen III

Hollow talking and hollow girl
Force it up from the root of pain
Never said it was good, never said it was near
Shadow rises and you are here
And then you cut
You cut it out
And everything
Goes back to the beginning

I remember visiting a family in Denmark in 1990 who over dinner told me of the plan to build a bridge between Copenhagen and Sweden. This completely blew me away. Build a bridge over the sea? Really? It seemed preposterous. Unbelievable. Remember that this was a time before the Channel Tunnel opened. Plus my geography was more than a little skewed and I had no idea just quite how near the south of Sweden was to the Danish capital. I imagined gigantic suspension arches strung sky high across hundreds of miles of ocean waves, with a road flailing to and fro in the air between them. Which wasn't quite what they had in mind. Obviously.

The double-decker High Level bridge across the River Tyne
is in the background

Nonetheless, the Oresund Bridge, which was finished about ten years later, is an undeniably impressive structure. It's double decker for starters - top deck for cars, bottom for trains. (Though Robert Stephenson did this first in Newcastle in 1847, with the trains on top.) And it does have a couple of very tall suspension towers, even if they aren't quite on the scale I imagined. But it doesn't actually go all the way across the strait - only as far as a manmade island in the middle, then it plunges into the water to become a tunnel, which looks more than a little freakish when viewed from the air. This is presumably to prevent planes landing or taking off from nearby Copenhagen Airport crashing into anything.

I have never seen The Bridge in the (concrete) flesh, only on the television series it has given its name to. And thanks to The Bridge, I am not sure I ever want to see it. Or even go near it. A lot of terrible things happen on that bridge. Boat collisions. Shootings. Corpses severed in two. A mustard coloured Porsche permanently speeding across it.

How did the Copenhagen and Malmo police cooperate before the Bridge was built? Did they row across the water to meet up? Or take a helicopter? Maybe they just phoned each other. Or perhaps they didn't need to cooperate at all, since if there was no Bridge, it probably meant that people didn't keep getting murdered on each other's soil.

But anyway, here we are again, our addiction fuelled and our Saturday nights once more lost to Saga Noren. The background's washed out to match her Porsche. There's another set of grisly, creepy murders to solve, involving mannequins, missing body parts, scarecrows, spotlights and lipstick. No sign of a Michael Gove look-a-like suspect this series yet, although there are gangsters, gamblers, vloggers, art collectors, surrogate babies and a scary stalking undertaker. And no sign of Martin either, since Saga got him sent to prison at the end of series two. I miss him, the great, flawed cuddly Danish bear that he was. His immediate replacement - a grumpy woman called Hanne who reminded me of Hanne Holm in Borgen - was quickly blown up by a caravan. The second - pill-popping insomniac Henrik - is lingering a little longer. He has a shirt that matches Saga's car. He seems to see dead people in his house, like Bruce Willis before him. He has also introduced Saga to the Copenhagen singles club scene. They wear green stickers begging FIND ME, though Saga's attempts at pick-up lines ("Do you want to have sex?") make these seem comparatively subtle.

The Little Mermaid

We are finding out more about Saga's past in this series. The mother with Munchausen By Proxy alluded to in Series 2 turns up to tell Saga her father is dying. She is armed with medical files which supposedly prove her innocent in whatever want on during Saga's childhood. But I don't really want to know. Just like I don't want to know exactly what part of the autistic spectrum Saga is meant to be on, if she is at all. I just want Saga to be Saga and do what she does best - working too hard, adhering to police protocol, making blunt remarks, finding poison in coffee cups, and unmasking killers called Gertrud. May she hold it together despite all that is being thrown at her this series (two dead parents - yes, two now, a lot can happen in the span of a single paragraph! - ill boss, crap new boss, her competence brought into question) so that long may she reign.

Dodgy summerhouse in Swedish woods,
where mosquitoes commit crimes against humanity

The Restaurant Man - Scandimanic Macclesfield

Maybe that's enlightenment enough: to know that there is no final resting place of the mind: no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom...is realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go." (Anthony Bourdain)

And suddenly there was not one but two Scandinavian themed food programmes in the same week. The Restaurant Man featured the opening of The Salt Bar, a Swedish themed establishment in the “cobbled quarter” (which looked significantly less romantic than it sounds) of Macclesfield. Restaurant Man himself Russell Norman rather shot himself in the foot when he declared in his introduction that there is little interest in Scandinavian food in the UK. But Hugh said the exact opposite on Sunday! Noma has been voted the best restaurant in the world at least once. Masterchef finalists were sent to work there one year. And - for that matter - has Russell never been in the jam-packed cafe in IKEA? Clearly not, since (speaking of jam) he also failed to spot restaurateur Debbie’s big fat typo on her menu in her spelling of lingonberry, which meant that Russell referred to it as ligonberry jam for the remainder of the programme. But I suppose that Russell doesn’t really strike me as the sort of person that needs cheap Billy bookcases and uplighters on an eternal Tower-of-Pisa-like lean in his lounge. He’s quite posh.

Actually, to call Debbie a restaurateur is a bit of an exaggeration. It’s certainly what she is aspiring to be, but her experience to date seems to have consisted entirely of two weeks’ bar work a very long time ago, which makes you wonder what on earth led her to believe she could set up and run a restaurant. It’s one thing liking good food, it’s another cooking it, and yet another cooking it for and serving it to 50 people a night, night after night after night. Especially when you haven’t actually written down a business plan or done any sums. It’s lucky that Debbie had a retirement nest egg to invest because no bank would have ever loaned her the money based on how few financial calculations she has done. “Show me some projected overheads or staffing costs.” Debbie’s lower lip instantly wobbles and tears loom in her mascara. Bless her, she means well.

Staffing costs? She was planning on running the whole place herself, with just one chef cooking in the kitchen, 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. Russell politely suggests that this may be illegal. Oh, he’s charming, that Russell. I dread to think how Gordon “Kitchen Nightmare” Ramsay might have made the same point.

But like all the people Russell is working with in this series, Debbie knows her food, and can cook well herself. This is some relief, but to have so little idea about what is involved in a restaurant service takes some doing.  Has she never been to a café before? (You mean people need cutlery? I should take their menus away once they’ve ordered?) If nice ladies like Debbie don’t get to eat out, then who in Macclesfield does? It is, as Russell points out, when disembarking from the train, a town of boarded up restaurants.

Debbie hasn’t done any market research either. It appears, when allowed to trial some of her signature dishes in another cafe, that people in Macclesfield don’t much care for salad. But the ladies at the local golf club are pleasantly surprised by beetroot on Ryvita.

Time ticks by, and the floor is still a pile of splintered wooden planks tossed randomly around. Debbie has also not realised that she might need a storage area for food and wine once she is up and running. Russell suggests she reduce the number of toilets from two to one in order to rectify this, but Debbie refuses to let the ladies share a toilet with the gents. It says a lot about the blokes in Macclesfield when Debbie says that men are, as an entire species, disgusting when drunk. She clearly also isn’t expecting people in the Salt Bar to skimp on the booze. Let’s hope she is planning on charging Scandinavian prices.

Time is ticking, yes, but as on every other week of this series, there’s still enough of it left for a nice exotic  trip. Last week, our gastropub gamers were taken up to shoot venison in Scotland. This week, Debbie got to serve up her vegetarian meatballs (a contradiction in terms, surely?) in a restaurant in Stockholm.

My husband and I got engaged in Stockholm. He proposed to me at twilight on the harbourside, with dozens of hot air balloons flying overhead. It is a beautiful, waterlined city that I shall always remember fondly, despite its unexpected humid July heat and monster mosquitoes on its archipelago. Debbie appears rejuvenated from her visit and miraculously pulls the rabbit out of the hat, or the gravadlax out of the cold-cure, and the restaurant opens on time, to very decent reviews on Trip Advisor. I love Scandinavian food and I wish her well. But she was astonishingly naive, at least if you believe everything you see on the telly. Thank goodness for Russell’s calm but forceful assistance, a rational and reasoned approach embodied perhaps in the silver tape measure he presents as a gift as he leaves.