Marriage usually leads to getting to know each other’s friends. Diana comes from the other side of the Penines, and that is how I have come to know some of her closest friends, who are members of the Greater Manchester Police Male Voice Choir.

There are festivals for police male voice choirs, just as there are for other male voice choirs, and the Manchester police choir has many friends abroad as well as in the UK, particularly in Sweden. So one of their most important events this year was to join the police male voice choir festival in Gothenberg, and we were honoured to receive an invitation to go with them as supporters. We took Jack, Diana’s young grandson.

We were lucky with the weather. We arrived in the heatwave at the end of bank holiday week at the beginning of June. The weather was glorious. The countryside is beautiful. Sweden is a huge country, many times the size of the UK, but has a population of about nine million. Where we would expect to see farms, open fields and market towns, there was only square mile upon square mile of forest – much of it, surprisingly, deciduous. There are bears and a few wolf packs in the forest, and you can get lost there. Viewing it brings stories like Hansel and Gretel vividly to life.

Swedish cities are spacious and clean. Gothenberg is a modern city. It was built as a fortress by the Swedish hero, King Gustavus Adolphus, in the 17th Century, but the town was also meant to become an international commercial center and took much of its architectural ideas from Holland.

The city stands on a huge river estuary, and there is a port, and ship building and repair yards. We found an interesting maritime museum, with modern war ships. These included a missile firing frigate (the first of its kind), and a submarine, which had both been recently decommissioned. Scrambling down the ladders and around the cramped quarters of the submarine was perhaps as exciting for me as it was for Jack!

Gotheberg also has the remains of Sweden’s only surviving Viking ship – there is just about enough of it left to make it possible to visualise its deep prow cutting through the waves, and flattish hull for speed down wind.

Gothenberg has its own theme park, the Lisemberg – well landscaped with rides and towers offering the usual thrills – rather like Flamingo land in many respects. There was a theatre and a band stand in the middle of the park, and the first concert was performed at this bandstand. Hours after the concert finished, the park was still as busy as a fairground, the crowds milling around against a background of canned classical music. Now, where in England would you find a theme park with male voice choirs and classical music?

There were more concerts on Friday and Saturday. Most of the choirs were Scandinavian – from Gothenberg and Stockholm in Sweden, and from Tempere, Turku and Norrkoping in Finland. The Lubeck Police choir came from Germany, and the UK was represented by Greater Manchester and the Suffolk Constabulary male voice choirs. The singing was excellent and included a rich variety of patriotic hymns, songs of love, national folksongs and popular music. The concerts were compered by a radio presenter, a Mr. Stefan Ljungqvist, whose task was to keep the audience amused, while the choirs changed places on the stage. He was an extraordinary man. He was fluent in at least three languages, and could make jokes in all of them. He spoke English without the slightest trace of a foreign accent. At the end of the Saturday concert, the combined choirs sang the Battle Hymn of the Republic, and someone sang one verse as a solo. The soloist raised the roof with a powerful voice which was unmistakably very English, and it took a long while to work out who the soloist was – ah yes, it was Stefan!

The end came with a visit to an old stately home, with wide lawns going down to a lake – with forests on all sides. All the choirs joined together in the last songs. The sun was bright, and they made a good picture in their different national uniforms.

It was a brilliant international event.