If I get no other exercise in, I do my daily half-hour of brisk walking. I almost always follow the same route, with some nice steepish hills here and there, and a decent-sized park at the far end that I take a big loop through.

The part that goes along streets is not very exciting. I’m not interested in other people’s houses and gardens. I usually read while walking and treat it as pure exercise. But the park is strikingly nice to look at, in almost any season and any weather. Swedish parks are – unlike English ones – generally devoid of flowers or anything else requiring more maintenance than the occasional mowing. They’re all just grass and trees and large bushes. But the large open space and the mostly uninterrupted greenery still feels very good.