We Brits are often reluctant to admit that anything we have has been influenced by someone else.
Somehow, we have made tea, curry and fish and chips our own, concocting extraordinary mental gymnastics to picture a time when King Cnut was waiting for the tide to come in whilst tucking into a vindaloo and a lovely cuppa.
The Vikings gave us place names (Ormskirk anyone?), everyday words and rather a lot of our culinary foundations, but we are not about to send them a thank you card any time soon.
But now, in an age of hamster-wheel pace of life, when we feel more isolated than ever and find ourselves wondering when our buildings became quite so soul-destroyingly ugly, we may need to confront the fact that our annoyingly straight-laced neighbours to the north might be onto something.
What the Swedes call fika and the Danes and Norwegians call hygge together capture something we have quietly lost - the deliberate art of slowing down, sitting with other people and being present in a room.
If you want a proper academic deep-dive into either concept, you might as well blóðörn me now. What I do know, however, is that Holm on King Street in Lancaster is the ideal place for us to reclaim a small yet important part of what makes us human.
Opened in the summer of 2020, the teeth of a pandemic, which is either brave or slightly mad, the Norwegian Holm occupies two interconnected shopfronts at 20-22 King Street, painted in a striking teal that announces itself against Lancaster's warm sandstone with a fitting confidence.
Inside, the space is unfussy - light wood counter seating running along the front window, warm pendant lighting, shelves lined with books and the odd Moomin figurine, and a Chesterfield sofa of deep crimson leather that has no business being quite so comfortable.
It describes itself as a Nordic-style café and market, coffee, cake, food and gifts, as the window plainly states, and it stocks a wide selection of Scandinavian produce alongside home-baked pastries and cakes. Coffee is roasted by Rinaldo's in nearby Kendal, keeping things properly local.
Although I am among the first through the door, there is an instant sense of potential - the feeling that this place could break up the turgid, grinding asphalt of one's day. (I am aware I work for a newspaper and my life is not a bleak episode of Black Mirror, but still.)
Soon enough, as my pancakes with bacon, maple syrup and a dusting of icing sugar arrive alongside a flat white and a kanelbullar — a cinnamon bun, to the uninitiated (and less pretentious), rolled tight and dusted without a trace of icing, because the Scandinavians know when to stop — the room begins to fill. Footsteps, the soft rearranging of chairs, the quiet percussion of crockery.
Some exchanges drift past with an airlessness, in one ear and out the other. Others leave their pollen on the brain. You will overhear something you were not supposed to, probably, and then guiltily feel glad that you did.
Sorry, Chris. I am afraid you are about to be cut out of your friendship group.
Where else can we have these all-too-human exchanges? Our cafés and pubs, each barely keeping their heads above water as rising rents, energy costs and changing habits threaten to drag them under, are the last vestiges where strangers still talk.
The recent closure of beloved Lancaster café 18a, which shut its doors at the end of April after more than seven years, still stings local business owners.
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Certain utterances attached to these places can feel like the seeds of a dandelion clock, hovering for a moment before the next gust of rising costs comes through and carries them off.
When it comes to our shared spaces, others should remain firmly rooted in our collective consciousness:
'Use it or lose it'.
Holm is at 20-22 King Street, Lancaster. Open Tuesday to Friday 8.30am–5pm, Saturday 9.30am–5pm.
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