The End of the World, or How Not to Do Petra with Kids

The sign said, 'The end of the world'; as did the look on my three-year-old's face. Below us, the dusky pink desert canyons and dimpled, rocky mountains of the Jordan Valley stretched west towards Jerusalem. And somewhere, far, far below the precipice we'd scaled to 'Sacrifice View', a bright blue cap was now swirling away, whisked off my son's head by the sharp wind that greeted us at the summit.

It was already late in the day, and here we were, five-month-old strapped to my chest, standing at one of Petra's remotest points, with an inconsolable small child. What had possessed us, not only to climb up 1,000-odd slippery sandstone steps to the monastery, which at 50-ish metres tall is the largest of the ancient city's vast edifices, but to continue beyond it to reach a peak?

The answer, of course, is the same reason we'd braved a two-day drive from Jerusalem, where we were living, with a car- phobic baby: for the chance to see Petra. All of Petra. Or as much as was feasibly possible to cover in a day while keeping donkey rides strictly for emergencies, which did not, incidentally, include climbing up to the monastery, but did include getting the aforementioned, now cap-less, son back to our hotel in Wadi Musa for his dinner.

Before it all went so wrong, it had all gone so right. Our trip, in December 2011, came at a bad time for Jordan: tourists were shunning the country out of misplaced fears it had been caught up in the Arab Spring. This had made Petra our own, give or take a few horse-drawn calèches weighed down by overweight visitors. And all we had to do to avoid those was clamber up to explore some of the many rose-red structures carved at neck-craning height, or higher.

Every visit starts, however, with the Treasury, the building immortalised in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. This columned marvel, seemingly superimposed on the jagged mountainside, bursts out of the cliffs as you exit the Siq, the 1km-long winding gorge through which all visitors must enter. Ropes bar you from going inside these days, although plenty of the other 800 buildings and monuments that the Nabateans carved out of that famous pink sandstone some 2,400 years ago are still accessible.

We'd mulled over bringing Louis's scooter, but the Siq's cobbled pathway is quickly replaced by the ancient city's sandy streets, so it was just as well we hadn't. A buggy would have been similarly useless, for anyone tempted. But the baby carrier, or carriers, for I packed a spare in case Raf faced a change of perspective, was just the ticket and made taking a baby around Petra a doddle.

It's the sense of isolation that awes you, once inside, as well as the immense scale. Climbing that peak really did have an end-of-the-world feel to it. As I trudged the 6km or so back to the entrance, I felt I'd short-changed the Nabateans by sacrificing just the one cap. But it turned out I needed not to have worried. The vomit-strewn sheets of a sunstroked child combined with the news that our London home had been burgled almost exactly while we were looking at that view, meant I ended up more than paying for my Petra experience. Not that I had any regrets.

(This was something I wrote for the Independent, but as I'd never posted from our side trip to Petra while living in Jerusalem in 2011 I thought I'd add it.)

LEGO lessons - by Daddy J

WHEN A child-oriented Scandiplan was first mooted, LEGOLAND was the first place on my hit list. A huge fan of Lego ever since my underage urban planning days, I've always assumed Lego towns to be faithful replicas of Nordic city life: thoughtfully laid out streets, old-fashioned shops, and ubiquitous emergency services. When Londoners moan about London it's normally because it's not Lego enough. And travelling around Scandinavia, it's clear that if the ideal small town or manageable-sized city life that we idealise so much still exists anywhere, it's up here. 
Yet ironically, for me, our visit to LEGOLAND actually threw the limits of the Nordic model into sharper focus. Because what lies at the heart of LEGOLAND, amid the pint-sized monorails and nobbly-bricked replicas of Hanseatic streets? LEGOREDO: the plastic piece people's homage to the harsh individualism of the Old West, complete with right-angled Rushmore. 
And which ride did Louis (and all the other kids) want to do most (alas he was too young this time)? The Lego driving school of course. Bikes and buses might turn on enviro-snobs like us but everyone from the Beatles to the Beach Boys to the good people at Volvo (hi guys!) knows that the car is still the most exciting invention in the history of mankind. Pootling around Copenhagen with the kids up front in the Christiania bike was fun for sure, but the biggest thrill of the trip for me was a stunning 300km meander along the snowy hairpins high above the Norwegian fjords. I really hope the well-planned cities of Scandinavia do offer a model for future urban life in favouring buses and bikes but LEGOLAND made me wonder if that's the case. 
Above all, the place is an exercise in nostalgia. It's not just the grown ups groping at memories of childhood happiness with every entrance fee or box of bricks they shell out for. The replica landmarks themselves seem to be the faded project of a more innocent time. LEGOLAND has now expanded beyond the street scenes and famous feats of civil engineering rendered in plastic bits that made up the original park. The newest sections feature two giant rollercoasters of the kind found in theme parks the world over. And the two coolest Lego models I remember seeing as a kid - Concorde and the Shuttle - are weather-beaten and a little forlorn, their real-life counterparts discontinued. The greatest inventions of my adult life - the Internet, GPS, the mobile phone - are already miniature if not invisible and certainly beyond replication in pimply rectangles. 
So the irony is that while the ciabattaring liberals of London like ourselves fawn over everything Scandinavian, viewed up close Nordic life and it's Lego replica are both deeply old-fashioned and, whisper it, conservative. And while life here is certainly good and possibly the best, it took a wannabe-actor waitress in Copenhagen to perfectly express the downsides of the Scandinavian way of life which we'd started to wonder even existed. Because people are so genuinely happy here, she said, nobody ever wants to do anything differently, to stand out, to strike out on their own. For that, she added, you need to go to America. In Copenhagen a waitress will always be a waitress, only in big old gas-guzzling America can a waitress talk of future movie stardom without being told to get a contented life. 
We admire Scandinavian society because of its equality, but only those who know they will never be the best stand to gain from an equal society. What if inequality - and its (cloakroom) attendant unhappiness - is not such a bad thing? Inequality breeds restlessness and restless people learn, explore, invent. Before coming on this trip I was pretty sure of at least one thing - I want my children to grow up happy. I still do, but now I'm less sure. Maybe they need to be a little restless too.

Bornholm: an underwater pearl

I SHOULD have known better than to moan about camping. Not because bitching about how miserable it was would force me to issue a retraction once we hit theoretical canvas bliss on the “Baltic pearl” that is the Danish island of Bornholm. But because with camping there is always worse to come.

For starters, there was the disappointment of rolling off the ferry into 14C and heavy drizzle as we drove off in search of our campsite. The only thing pearl-like about Bornholm is that it's also under water. I can’t believe I bought into the myth that it's Denmark’s sunniest spot. Had I not spent hours watching the horizontal rain in The Killing? Not to mention fixated on Sarah Lund's attachment to that sweater. 

That said, I’d kill for mere drizzle now: I’m lying in our tent, a storm raging overhead. It’s a moot point what’s loudest: the rain thundering down on the canvas overhead, or the tent blowing in on itself with every new gust of wind. I’m not sure how both boys are still asleep but I am quite sure that they won’t stay asleep for long. The fact that I’m here solo, with DJ ensconced in a dry bar down the beach watching the footie isn’t helping.

It’s his toilet I’m most jealous of: the cruel irony about being stuck in a tent in the pouring rain is the pressure it puts on your bladder. And that’s without even drinking anything this evening for fear of having to trek half a mile back across the sandy pine forest for the loo. 

I should be glad Bjorn, the Dane who runs this campsite with exacting precision, at least lets me pee for free. Precious little else is included in what’s a fairly hefty nightly charge given that we brought our own four walls. There’s even a 20kr fee to watch each quarter final, on a telly he removes at the end of each evening from what is allegedly a communal dining space next to the kitchen. Hence why DJ’s elsewhere. 

It’s 5kr a pop to charge a phone or similar, although I snuck a few extra percentage points on mine earlier by unplugging the microwave. He earmarked us as trouble makers after we mistakenly left our dishes in the kitchen for ten minutes on our first night while we finished setting up the tent and putting both kids to bed. And as for Louis parking one of the toy cars outside our tent while he played on the beach, well, it turns out Bjorn would rather they were all lined up, unused, outside the reception.

What with the fee to shower, to use the baby bath, etc etc, we might as well be staying in a hotel. Which, if this rain continues (which is what’s forecast), is exactly where we’ll be come tomorrow night. 

Cycle not-so chic

BORGEN!! 

IF HELL is other people, then hell for babies is other people’s ideas about happiness. Especially if they involve two wheels. Or three wheels, in the case of a Danish cargo bike. Or, possibly, in the case of our car-adverse child, four wheels.

This I proved after our day cycling around one of the world’s best bike cities was less living the dream, and more living the nightmare for the 11 month old. To be fair, it got off to a bad start when having strapped them both into the front of my three-wheeled Christiania bike I couldn’t even manage to steer out of Baisikeli’s parking lot. Those things are heavy! Even without two extra people on board. So much for my plans of peddling the kids effortlessly around town, their Scandi-esque blonde bouffs blowing in the breeze.

Things only got worse when the squall that blew in after I’d reluctantly switched saddles with Daddy J meant we had to abandon ship (bike?) until it had passed. We were now well into lunchtime territory, and for a growing nearly 1 year old, a slurp of milk just didn't hack it. Plus it's a safe bet neither child enjoyed getting togged up in their Scandi POP raingear as much as I enjoyed – finally – getting some use out of the damn things even if the rain meant I’d look more Copenhagen cycle shit than chic in the Sindy pics.

In retrospect, I should have twigged that sitting up front in a Christiania bike was always going to be murder for a baby who hates being strapped in anything that isn’t also strapped to me. And the stormy skies meant that each time Raf was in the slightest danger of getting into any sort of groove, we had to stop to take shelter. He couldn’t even nod off come naptime because there was nowhere for him to lean his head, his big brother being accommodating, but only up to a point.

Where Raf really suffered, however, was that although he’d clocked up his Scandi telly hours in front of The Killing and Borgen while nursing of an evening, he hadn’t taken in any of it. So he couldn’t share in what ended up making us happiest of all about our cycle tour: peddling through Borgen itself. Or clocking Troels Hartmann’s Rathaus (Copenhagen's town hall, and the other star of the Killing along with that sweater), which is possibly the city's prettiest tower. Perhaps the key to happiness is just watching more TV, especially if it’s Danish. 

Wonderful Copenhagen?

At Louisiana, by Louis

HAS ANYONE ever thought about the downsides to living in the world’s happiest place? Because that’s where we are, according to the UN’s survey of global happiness.

What if you wake up in a bad mood? Or on a campsite with the rain thundering down on your tent (see previous post)? Or maybe you’re childless and stuck in a job you don’t like, paying exorbitant taxes to fund the amazing nurseries that allow Scandi mums to live the feminist dream. Heck, maybe you’re a petrol head who hates bikes, or potentially worse, given the city’s reputation for two-wheeled glamour – the Copenhagen cycle chic blog is now a Thames & Hudson book for goodness sake – perhaps you just like cycling in a fleece.

Two days in and the pressure is on, I’ll admit. Yesterday’s wet start was a challenge but a run along the sea front from Charlottenlund Fort helped me out (if not Daddy J whom I left battling the baby’s morning nap). Not least because I ticked at least three boxes on my Scandi stereotype scorecard: naked Danish man emerging from a dip; modernist architectural gem of a service station; and a PH lamp dangling in someone’s front room.

And with enough breaks in the clouds, I’d defy anyone to feel miserable after a trip to the stunning Louisiana modern art museum, half an hour’s drive up the coast. Then again, perhaps I’d have been happier had my bank account stretched to more in the shop than a Copha watch for Father’s Day. I know DJ would have smiled more if I’d allowed him to feast on the café’s Nordic buffet rather than picnic on my rotting avocado and Camembert rolls.

The real test, though, would be today and the cycling trip we had planned around one of the world’s top cycling cities for an Indy on Sunday photo op. Would the baby live the dream in the Christiania bike I’d lined up from the guys at Baisikeli? Or would he reveal his London roots by grumbling his way round? What’s more, could I be happy peddling around in a scratch outfit pulled together on a campsite?

Screw it up and I might as well be in the UK where at least there’s no pressure to smile all the time. 

Camping: the lowdown

Breakfast

 FOR THE record, while hatching our plan to come away I was adamant about one thing. We couldn’t keep moving around because the constant packing up would drive me mad. This much I knew from the two weeks we had spent road-tripping in the US, back when “we” was just the one extra small person. At the very least, we’d need an RV or its Euro equivalent, even if that put us in the same bracket as German retirees. And there was no way you’d catch me camping. Not on a traditional campsite. With two children, including a small baby. In northern Europe, for goodness sake.

But then I dreamt up the Scandiplan. Only somehow I’d forgotten to factor in the cost of living in countries where the only reason residents get so much back from the state, such as fabulously cheap childcare, is because everything is so darn expensive due to sky-high taxation. My dreams of a Sodermalm flat swap remained precisely that, dreams, so rather than bankrupt ourselves with hotel bills, a tent was bought. Not by me, I hasten to add. That would have made me complicit in the camping part of the plan. And that might have meant I couldn’t complain when things, inevitably, didn’t go as envisaged.

It’s hard to narrow down exactly what’s worst about camping: the rain; the cold; the not having a clue where anything is; the looooooong walk to the loo in the night; the claustrophobic sleeping bag; the lack of sleeping bag as I discovered after Arctic temperatures rendered useless my plan to sleep under only an Ikea duvet; the light; the dark; the sick baby with a fever of 40C despite the aforementioned night temperatures…… Shall I continue?

Even DJ pitched in with his own bete noire this evening: the smug gaze from within a – dry – campervan awning as two wrinkled pensioners, who ran out of anything to say to each other back in the 1980s, watch our attempts to pitch a tent at gone 8pm with two feral children on the loose. That said, shortly after he said that, the Danish campervanner opposite came over proffering a thermos of coffee “because you both look so tired”. Which almost made it all worse!

Then there’s the horror of watching the battery percentage tick down on the various pieces of thirsty electronics I own. And that’s forgetting my biggest camping casualty: the Kindle I trod on while trying to locate my mobile phone so I could turn it off to save the battery. Oh, the irony.

To be fair, camping has the odd plus. But I’ll need to warm up – and dry out – before they trip off the tongue.  

Lax understanding

Fjallbacka at dawn

NOW THAT we all think we can speak Scandinavian (and by “all”, obviously I mean all those who’ve lost 50 hours of their lives to The Killing, Borgen, and The Bridge), mastering the lingo for this trip should have been a doddle. But beyond “thanks”, which is helpfully something approximating “tack” in all three of the Nordic languages we’ve encountered, our Scandinavian remains embarrassingly sketchy.

Given how well everyone here speaks English, that shouldn’t matter. (So well, in fact, that one of the writers behind the BBC’s next Scandi show Lillyhammer – the Norwegian comic drama starring ex-Sopranos’ Steven van Zandt that will air this Autumn – told me local TV audiences didn’t mind characters speaking Norwegian and English because they could understand both languages.)

But I’ve run into trouble here in Fjallbacka because I can’t find what I want to read in English. The pretty coastal town is home to Sweden’s premier crime writer, Camilla Läckberg, whose detective series has outsold even Stieg Larsson on his home turf. She was born and brought up among Fjallbacka’s red clapboard cottages, and despite now living in Stockholm uses the town as the backdrop to all of her novels. A lack of British tourists, thus far at least, means that the local ironmongeress-cum-celebrity (Berith, the owner, is one of just two locals to feature as themselves in Läckberg’s books) only stocks the author’s original Swedish versions.

I’m told that this will change once the latest Läckberg TV series hits the airwaves. It’s being filmed now, and has already been snapped up by the French. My money is on the Beeb following suit, given its quest to mop up Nordic noirs. 

My lack of Swedish means I can also only guess at the recipes in the cookbook I found today in Berith’s store. Penned by Läckberg herself and her childhood buddy Christian Hellberg, who just happens to be Sweden’s top chef and another Fjallbacker, the book is a Nigella-esque tome that combines the requisite lifestyle porn and enough glamorous friend envy to make it an immediate hit in Britain, were it to be available in translation.

Perhaps the Beeb should stop looking for Scandi thrillers and get Läckberg fronting her own Nordic cookery show. 

Fiskpudding and fun

Swedish fiskpudding

 “ARE YOU having lots of fun?” someone asked me on Twitter today. Fun? On a six-week gruel-a-thon of a holiday-cum-extended work trip? Knocking off three countries in a car? With two small children? Now there’s a question.

What’s odd about being away for so long, and trying to squeeze so much out of such a large chunk of time off, is that sometimes it seems as if fun is about the last thing you remember to have. Experiences, yes, by the bucketful. But fun, when the Volvo’s speaky lady keeps telling you the time it will take to reach your campsite halfway across Norway is increasing; or when yet again there’s no hope of glimpsing any sun, let alone midnight sun; or when you realize it’s gone 7pm and the only restaurant in sight for under £100 a head is McDonalds; well, that’s a tricky one.

It’s not that I don’t adore being away. And certainly not that Scandinavia isn’t living up to my – admittedly exalted – expectations. And most definitely not that I’m not loving the chance to be with both small people, and their Dad, 24/7. But sometimes it seems like we’re so busy being on the road that simply having fun falls by the wayside.

The beauty of this trip, though, is that magical moments just creep up on you. Some, like today, are pretty clear-cut. Our day out on the Weather Islands, Sweden’s most westerly point, reachable by boat from the coastal town of Fjallbacka, was always going to be special. And despite the unpromising weather, we all had a ball: the highlight being a tie between the unfortunately named “fiskpudding” for lunch, and a rocky scramble around the largest of the 365 islands in the archipelago.

Other times, though, creep up on you. Like a pitstop by a snowy road in western Norway, when the half-hour it takes the saucepan of water to boil for tea is the perfect opportunity for a then still three-year-old boy to magic himself into Lightning McQueen out for a drive in his snow tires. Or that time when two brothers are so engrossed in the wonder of each other that they’re utterly absorbed while you pack up camp. 

Those, yes, are the moments when you realize that this trip is special for a whole mountain of reasons, fun most definitely being one of them. And that’s before we hit Legoland, our next destination – provided we make our 9am ferry from Gothenburg tomorrow. 

Tripp-Trapped

NORWAY: LAND of fjords, fish, ferry boats and..... Tripp Trapps. Which, to the uninitiated, are highchairs. But not just any highchairs. Somehow Tripp Trapps, made by the Norwegian firm Stokke, stand like a parental badge of honour in middle-class British kitchens: owning one catapults mums and dads into some kind of super league. Or so I used to feel, strapping Louis into his Ikea hand-me-down while quipping that if we really loved him, he'd have had a Tripp Trapp (rrp £159, excluding the baby bar, cushion, harness, tray, etc etc).

Not so in Norway, where to have a child is to have a Tripp Trapp - or Tripp Trapps when numbers two and three come along. This was something I got to witness at first hand in Alesund, the coastal Art Nouveau gem that just happens to be home to Stokke, when a Norwegian family we met over a Lego session on a rainy Sunday in a local museum ended up inviting us back to their house for dinner. Salmon and Stokkes. Two kids, two Tripp Trapps. 

Indeed, my fact of the trip may just turn out to be that Tripp Trapps are used as standard in Norwegian nurseries. Well, that and the fact that Norwegian mums get something called breastfeeding leave AFTER they return to work: for ten months they can spend two hours of their working day nursing, meaning they get to arrive an hour later and leave an hour earlier each day. And that's after taking ten months off at full pay (or 12 months at 80 per cent). I shudder to imagine what Tripp Trapps round a table at a London nursery would do to the fees (£1,000 minimum per month compared with £320 maximum in Norway). 

Norwegians, it seems, just suck up the cost of stocking up with Stokkes. Perhaps because they don't seem terrible value in a country where a beer and fish snack at an Oslo street market costs £20. Or I guess they may just love their kids more. It goes without saying that my top interview to date is Mr Tripp Trapp himself, aka Peter Opsvik, who designed the chair back in 1972. Be still my beating aspirational mummy heart! No prizes for guessing my souvenir of choice were we actually driving our Volvo estate back to London. 

Snow joke

ASIDE FROM Daddy daycare (Pappi playtime?), living the Scandi dream for kids means swapping an indoor existence for an outdoor one. And I don’t just mean frolicking about on lakeside beaches when it’s sunny. No, Nordic babies toughen up from birth by taking all of their naps outside, even in winter. If Pappi wants to warm up with a coffee, he leaves the sprog in buggy outside the café. This continues at nursery where toddlers play and nap outside in anything down to minus 10C.

The trick is in the clothing, for as the old Russian saying goes: “There’s no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothes.” To be fair, this meant in “olden times”, to coin Louis’s phrase, children pretty much sat out winter, snoozing their way through the long, dark days in countryside cabins because their home knitwear wasn’t up to the task. But it was all change in the 1970s when Polarn O Pyret, the iconic stripy Swedish kidswear brand, hit the scene with its durable, weatherproof overalls and trousers.

This made the Nordic feminist revolution a happy triumvirate of working women, warm children, and proliferating nurseries, which expanded rapidly from the early 1970s to give mums somewhere to dump their kids. Indeed, Polarn’s MD, Maria Oqvist, told me the main reason the company churned out so much outerwear was so Scandi mothers could earn a crust happy in the knowledge that their children were snug. Not to mention stylishly clothed.

Given our camping plans and northern European summer weather, I figured I’d need to waterproof both boys before setting off. As it’s annoyingly cheaper to buy Scandi in London than shop locally this meant a trip to the Polarn concession in House of Fraser rather than a fun shop in situ. Having the right gear somewhat eased the pain of driving into winter as we clocked up the kilometers north. But I somehow still managed a walk in a Roros blizzard, in JUNE, with both small people woefully underdressed because I’d forgotten to pile on the layers. You can take a mum out of London......

Scandequality - by Daddy J

NOT QUITE 48 hours into our trip and we’d already been offered the forest sauna. Two days after that Sweden douze-pointed it to Eurovision glory. So by the time it got to Monday morning in Stockholm we were on a hatrick for national stereotypes. Safe to say what’s drawn us to Scandinavia isn’t the chance to sit starkers in a hot room or reach euro-disco nirvana. For work-life tightropers like ourselves it's the idea of Scandinavia as Mecca for gender-bending metro parenting that really thrills. It was time to take to the equality streets.

Having lunched in a suitably trendy deli in suitably trendy Sodermalm I thought I was in the perfect spot to find kindred daycare Dads when Working Mum left us to go bag an interview. When the time comes to write the guidebook on hipster playgrounds the one on Nyagatan will be right up there, but even so I was the only Dad there for at least 30 minutes and when one did turn up he was American. So much for Scandequality.

By the time we caught up with WM at the Nordiska Museum, Boy 2 who'd been peaky overnight had taken a worrying turn for the worse and so did our pretence at Modern Parenting when it fell to Mum to jump in a cab in search of a doctor post-puke.

That left me and Boy 1 killing time in a museum dedicated to Swedish folk history. Among the empty exhibition halls we did find other Dads out with their kids at last – perhaps they knew better than to take a sickly infant to an outdoor playground in the chill of a Nordic May. So for a brief hour or so we lived the genderless parenting dream cruising exhibitions on dolls houses and interior design. Male bonding, Scandi-style.

The car's the star

As taken by Louis

ASK THE soon-to-be four year old about his trip highlights and barely a few days in I know what they’ll feature. The car. Or, to be precise, “the Vol-vo car” as he calls it. And who could blame him. Not only is the car a joy - even for a passenger a four-hour stint zips by - but a session on the open road affords the perfect opportunity to cross several stereotypes off the master checklist.

First up has to be conformity, from the number of fellow Vol-vo drivers out there, to their absolute dedication to conform to what is expected of them on the roads. Chiefly, sticking to the speed limit. Even when it’s set at an absurdly low 80km/hr on a deserted road north that passes through never-ending forests. And never over-taking, not even when crawling after a log carrier for kilometer after kilometer after kilometer.

Brushing 110km/hr on the motorway (speed limit 100km/hr) west out of Gothenburg instantly earned us the raised eyebrows and a glare from a motorbike-riding policeman, who just happened to pull up along side us.

Then there’s the nagging voice of Vol-vo, which butts in to interrupt your driving reveries if your attention so much as falters for a second. Cross the dotted white lines between lanes without indicating and it will beep: “Don’t do that, don’t do that, don’t that”. Get too close to the car in front and the engine will slow down for you, and as for swerving, momentarily, into the hard shoulder: an image of a coffee cup flashes up on the dashboard, warning: “Driver alert, take a break.” If only it could brew up a cup on the spot.

Ultimately the lack of speeding underlines Swedes’ rationality: it’s bonkers to risk one’s life for the sake of arriving somewhere five minutes earlier. Or not at all, if all goes wrong. But mankind isn’t designed to be rational, especially not when cosseted inside the comforting frame of a Vol-vo car.

Not that Louis is fussed about national stereotypes. He mainly likes the electric windows, and the button on the key that lifts the boot automatically. Not forgetting “speaky lady”, the authoritative voice of the in-built GPS that must have saved countless marriages the world over by taking the rap for dodgy directions. I guess kids just defer to authority, much like the Swedes, or so it seems. 

Land of the Midnight Sons

EXCUSE THE (London-based) hiatus, but babies who brunch is back, for a while at least. After surviving our three-month stint in Jerusalem, life back home seemed a little tame, so we've headed up to Scandinavia to eke a few more adventures out of my maternity leave with a Nordic roadtrip. For once, Daddy J isn't working: instead, he's making like a Scandi pappa and has taken some time off unpaid.


Our six-week trip will take in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, starting and ending in Gothenburg, where we're picking up a Volvo, naturally. In true Borgen fashion (for non-Scandi TV obsessives, that's the one about the Danish mum-cum-PM, this time I'm the one working. If you call traveling round, visiting cool places "work". (Although with two small kids in tow, it really is....) I'm writing a big magazine piece about why Brits love Scandinavia so much. Unless it's just me, which I don't think it can be considering Britain awarded the Swedish Eurovision winner Loreen the full 12 points the other night.

With two non-sleepers along for the ride, Scandinavia is proving less the land of the midnight sun, and more the land of the midnight sons. Did anyone say "fika"*?
*Scandi for coffee and cake

'O sprawling dump of Bethlehem'

The star marks The Spot

IF EVER a place name over-promises, it's Bethlehem. Only a fool would expect the town to deliver on the Christmas magic even hardened atheists have sung about over the years, yet still the word teases, playing havoc with expectations. To minimise the disappointment, we saved our trip until well into December; a sweaty walk around Manger Square and its year-round Christmas shops holding zero appeal.

I felt bad using a copy of the Christmas Story to prime Louis: he was hoping for straw and an actual stable at one point despite all my caveats. Luckily his inner consumer was as excited about the wooden crib scene I'd promised as finding the actual spot of the birth.

While our journey, in the borrowed work jeep, was always going to be easier than that fabled one on a donkey, Bethlehem's West Bank location means getting there is never straight forward - something even Dubya found out after Condi forced him to swap his helicopter for a car. "It's awful," he admitted, Rice's memoirs revealed, despite sweeping through the checkpoints that make life such hell for Palestinians. The town is barely 10km from Jerusalem but might as well be on another planet for most of its residents, something we found out later on while driving around, lost, trying to find the gap in the separation barrier we needed to leave. With no road signs to Jerusalem we had to stop and ask, yet queries about the location of our destination were met with shrugs from several locals.

"O little town" it most certainly isn't; sprawling concrete dump being more apt, with the graffiti on the monochrome wall that hems the town in on three sides providing the only colour on the way in and out. With a wave of the passport we popped through the small gap, and into a dystopian Alice in Wonderland where nothing was as it seemed and the street names on Google maps are bizarrely blank.

We were headed, naturally, for the Church of the Nativity and the star that marks That Spot. Or, the spot as randomly decreed by Emperor Constantine's mum, St Helena, who decided where to build the church. Maybe it was because my expectations were as blunt as one of our kitchen knives, or perhaps carrying our own baby gave the occasion an additional poignancy, but I did find the church atmospheric. I guess all the candles lit for blessings must have got my inner pyromaniac into the mood.

Church aside, the real draw was the turning on of the Christmas lights in Manger Square. We waited patiently for what felt like hours along with thousands of locals. Personally, I think they should have turned on the lights BEFORE the interminable speeches because all was as dark as the carol says until the Palestinian PM flicked the switch. A highlight was the hiatus while the mosque opposite the Church of the Nativity called its faithful - two-thirds of Bethlehem's population today - to prayer.

This being Israel, or rather Palestine, something as simple as celebrating Christmas feels like a political act, essentially because it's such a big deal for the Palestinians (who get a day's holiday) and such a non-event for Israelis. Not that the politics bothered the three year old; what with the fireworks that followed the tree lighting and a souvenir snow globe with Mary and Jesus, Bethlehem's magic lives on - in his eyes at least.

The city that Christmas forgot

IT'S A magnet for Christian pilgrims and capital of the Holy Land, yet somehow Jerusalem is the city that Christmas forgot. Imagine getting to five days to go - or is it four, I've lost track - and not hearing a single Cliff Richard tune in a shop, eating a mince pie, overdoing it on the festive drinking, maxing your credit card on pointless presents, or preparing to spend hours queuing for that Kelly Bronze you'll overcook only to remember why turkey is a once-a-year dish.

Not that I'm complaining; December here is proving something of a joyous release from the consumerist celebration formally known as Christmas. Not to mention an excuse for being stingy and lazy. Luckily Louis at three is just about young enough not to know any better, although I fear it's the last year I'd get away with giving him one of Daddy J's socks to hang up on Christmas Eve (yes, really - well, it fits a tangerine, what more does he need?).

My initial excitement at spending the Christmas build-up barely miles from where it all - allegedly - kicked off was somewhat tempered when a Jewish friend pointed out that even the handful of Christians here are largely Orthodox so don't celebrate until January 7 or even later. And to the Jews and Muslims, the 25th really is just another day. In any case, the Jews are busy with their Hanakkah festivities, which the cynical might say conveniently overlap our own and include the main tenets, namely gaudy lights and presents, but I couldn't possibly comment.

All that aside, I feel we've done our bit: the tree - small and plastic and adorned with homemade origami decorations - is up and twinkling with some lights I picked up in the sole Christmas shop the Christian quarter of the Old City had to offer. All nine Christmas cards we've received (and that includes the extra ones for Louis and Raf from the grandparents) are up and I've listened to Stevie Wonder's Christmas CD. I've even scored us a table at Jerusalem's top restaurant for lunch on the 25th: try doing that in a city that actually celebrates Christmas. Best of all, turkey will be strictly off the menu. Turns out being here is win-win. With apologies to anyone who might have hoped for a card.

Shopping in the shuk

OCADO IT is not. There's the 3km walk there for starters: uphill, with two children in tow, naturally. And back again. Buggy laden with more plastic bags than the Daily Mail could hope to persuade Brits to save in a year. Such is shopping in the shuk, which sounds remarkably like souk, but is actually Hebrew for market, something I've been doing since our second day in this city and something I will miss more than just about anything else about living here.

It has its downsides. That walk, for starters. Especially the day Louis insisted on scootering. Or the one I left the buggy behind, but still bought two massive bags of produce, including a litre of olive oil. And I invariably pick the busiest of times to go, like the day before Yom Kippur and both the Shabbat-rules Sukkot holiday days. Not to mention most Fridays, including today, when seemingly all of Jerusalem piles in either to stock up for the one day that the shops are shut or to watch everyone else stocking up.

Me, I like to do a bit of both: stockpiling and watching, although as today was my third trip this week Louis got off relatively lightly on the shopping front. Best are the bearded, black-hatted Haredim men, armed with ancient buggies-cum-shopping trolleys, who clearly scout out the best bargains going. I saw a few scuttle along this afternoon barely minutes before the shuk shut to nab everything going cheap.

I used to lure Louis up there with the promise of a tram ride: the track goes down Jaffa Road, perpendicular to the shuk, or Machane Yehuda to use its proper name. But now he's ridden the entire line he's a bit more blase, so I'm left with tummy-led temptations. For a while I used the ice cream at Mousseline (on Ha-Eshkol Street next to the Khachapuri bakery if you're in the area): sublime. But now it's colder we're back to "pink pasta" at the Italian we found on that first trip, which I know now is called Pasta Basta. Back on day two, I was desperate for somewhere to feed both the little people and the tiny cafe, on a corner inside the warren of bustling streets, happened to have a seat. I was too daunted by the Hebrew menu initially to order much more than a salad and a juice, a mistake I quickly rectified. They keep it simple, with just three pastas and several sauces, onto which you can pile any number of toppings. It's quick, unusually cheap for Jerusalem, and exceptionally delicious, Louis' top pick being wholewheat fettuccine with beetroot, oil, and garlic.

The pasta place is emblematic of the changes to what must rank among the world's top food markets, with a number of new cafes opening in the past couple of years, not to mention upmarket cheese shops, olive oil stalls, and even shops selling locally designed pottery and jewellery. Come night time, when the vegetable (and meat and fish) sellers have gone home, cafe tables spill out into the shuk's inner streets and take over (so I'm told; I have yet to leave our flat). All very Borough, but with the bonus of coming home with change from £20 for more freshly picked produce than I know what to do with.

I used to think I'd be glad to get back to Ocado but after tasting the dinner I made tonight, which was nothing fancy (green beans, dill, onion, garlic, and feta, baked in olive oil and lemon juice with bulghur), I'm already in mourning for all the vegetables we'll leave behind. Air flown, polystyrene-packed Kenyan green beans just aren't going to cut it.

Dead buoyant

"HOPE YOU get treated to a couple of days in a Dead Sea spa," a friend wrote, on hearing of my 13-night sanity testing stint as a solo mum (with apologies to single mothers who have to do it day in, day out). The very idea got short shrift in the car on Sunday as we headed south along the Dead Sea coastline towards Masada, an ancient Jewish fortress high up in the Judean desert. Louis looked briefly panicked, before realising it was such a crazy suggestion that I had to be joking.

The sea - an inland lake where there's no need to hire deck chairs because you can just read sitting up in the water - stretches out below the vast hilltop palace, reflecting the intense blue of the sky most days. In the background is Jordan, all jagged hills rather than bands of angels but no less beautiful for it. The history is haunting: the site, built by Herod the Great, he of Nativity play fame, was the location of the Jews' last stand against their Roman oppressors in 73 AD. It ended with a mass slaughter, by Jews, of Jews, rather than become Roman chattels.

Staring at the sea was too much even for Louis, who had been warned he couldn't paddle because it's too salty (not worth risking getting it in children's eyes apparently), so we took the cable car back down after an explore and a picnic lunch and headed for Mineral Beach, one of only a handful of places you can swim because of the sinkholes. We made it with minutes to spare before the sun dipped behind the now pink desert ridge but there was time enough to slather on some mud and fulfil an ambition held since I was barely older than Louis after seeing a picture of someone reading a newspaper in an old book about the world I used to own. We gave the freshwater paddling pool a miss because it was too chilly. Ditto the hot sulphur bath: too many fat Russians hogging the water.

It was hardly that spa break, but fun nonetheless. And I spotted a shop in the Old City that sells the mud, although given the rate the Dead Sea is drying up I should probably stick to face wash.

The Olive Mountain

Olive face

IF EVER there were a site to appeal to Louis, it's the Mount of Olives. The bitter, salty Middle Eastern staple after which the hill is named is, inexplicably, his favourite snack, so his eyes lit up when I suggested a visit. To lessen a three-year-old's disappointment at finding little more than a giant cemetery - Jews have been buried on the slope since Biblical times and it is home to more than 150,000 graves - I packed plenty of olives for our picnic.

The coach loads of Christians (who comprise two-thirds of all tourists to Israel) have to walk up the steep hill because the hair pin bends up are too sharp for a tour bus, but with DJ finally back in town we had some (borrowed) wheels, so were saved the hike. We might not have earned our lunch but out came the olives anyway. And quickly disappeared into Louis's stomach. With any luck, the stones will help to make up for the lack of olive trees there today.

From the top you can see not only the Dome of the Rock in all its golden glory, but also some of East Jerusalem's most contentious neighbourhoods, including Silwan, which is today home to Palestinians but the Jews value because it flanks their precious Mount of Olives. Hence the efforts by Israeli settlers to evict Palestinians from their homes, citing in some cases claims that Jews owned the houses before the anti-Jewish pogroms of the 1930s. Laws favouring Jews help, but the legalities are always murky and judicial battles can last decades. Settler victory comes with flags attached, reams and reams of blue-and-white Israeli flags, draped from every corner of their new home, like the one atop the ridge.

Hearing the afternoon muezzin call made me think that even settlers can't have it all: the thickest double glazing in the world couldn't block out the cacophony of prayer calls that bounce off each side of Jerusalem's many valleys five times each day. And there's no hiding from the glare of that golden dome.

The toilet lady

IT WAS Louis who spotted her: the stenciled lady on the side of a bus shelter, just up the hill from our flat. She'd appeared overnight, the familiar silhouette that adorns toilet signs the world over, rendered unfamiliar in the context of a Jerusalem advertising hoarding.

"What's that?" he asked, probably wondering where her habitual male companion was. I couldn't read the Hebrew daubed alongside but I could guess what it said given the city's unofficial ban on women appearing on public billboards. The image had to be part of the spiraling protest against rampant sexism that is turning Israeli women into second-class citizens.

It was still early - we were on our way to the yoga class at a local playcentre that keeps me semi sane - so I left the lecture on female equality for later in the day. But even our destination reminded me that gender segregation is commonplace here: all but three of the yoga classes are women-only.

From the army, where religious conscripts are being urged to walk out of events when women sing, to religious schools, which are banning dads from watching their daughters perform in end-of-term plays, women are getting an increasingly raw deal in public life thanks to pressure from the religious right. The situation is worst in Jerusalem, where even retailers can't use female images in their ads, but is deteriorating elsewhere.

Segregation starts in the synagogue, where men and women sit separately: at the Western Wall, a smaller wall divides the sexes. On the street, gender division is most blatant on buses, where the Orthodox men take the front seats, leaving the back for the ladies.

There are some unusual flipsides - some might say benefits - to such draconian notions about women: on Fridays there are more Haredi fathers than mothers stocking up for Shabbat in the shuk, the city's main food market. But there are downsides too. Consider the school textbook that teaches children about the virtue of respect. The illustration? A man.

With some leading questions, I managed to make Louis see the light but it's worrying to think his Israeli peers, including a new generation of kids whose parents have "made aliyah" (what Jews call emigrating to Israel), might ask the same question about a real female image on the side of a bus shelter elsewhere.

The Israel Museum

Contemplating the Shrine of the Book

I HAVE discovered the secret to taking a three-year-old child round a museum. It's not the interactive kids' section (or, at least, it might be but I tend to avoid them - can't bear the other children), but rather the video art installations. Louis adores them. The more esoteric, the better, too.

Take today's trip to the Israel Museum: once he'd got over the excitement of the fountain spraying water over the white domed Shrine of the Book, which houses the Dead Sea Scrolls (the oldest bible ever found, for any heathens), the exhibit that most captivated him was a video of a pair of boots sinking into a frozen pond. Because every display had to have some kind of Israeli message, the boots had been first dunked into the Dead Sea to cake them in salt crystals, and then taken to a frozen lake in Gdansk where the salt was left to do its work.

To say the piece was light on the action is an understatement, but still he watched, spellbound, for the full 20 minute or so cycle it took to complete. Another favourite was a man spinning round on his stomach on some tarmac holding a piece of chalk. Yet another was some sort of take off of Eve and the apple, involving a naked lady, lots of watermelons, and some sea. It was supposed to represent the founding of a new country, but the nuances escaped me. And him, I imagine.

The only video installation that left him cold was the one I liked best, Chic-point, by Arab-Israeli artist Sharif Waked. Filmed on an "occupied catwalk", it featured outfits suitable for an Israeli checkpoint. Each one was cut away to reveal a slash of midriff, thereby saving the IDF guards the bother of stopping and searching each Palestinian hoping to pass through.

What with the scale model of Jerusalem at the time of the Second Temple, Anish Kapoor's polished-steel hourglass "Turning the World Upside Down, Jerusalem" sculpture, and the fun scooter trip, on an olive tree-lined path zig-zagging the hill up to the museum, the trip was a hit and one we will repeat - if only to brave the Youth Wing to see if it's worth the fuss.