In 1973 I was living in a share house in London, finishing my postgraduate studies in chemistry and riding around on a sputtering Finnish motorbike. One summer evening I arrived home, covered in oil spatters, to find a beautiful Swede named Barbro sitting in our kitchen.
She had turned up out of the blue, a friend of one of the girls in the flat who had hit a rough patch. From the outset I found her to be a very interesting person to talk to and her progressive Scandinavian approach to life made her much better company than many of the British girls I knew at the time.
