Herring and seeing

Early autumn in Stockholm, blue and yellow flags in a clear, sunny sky, the harbour busy with ferries and sailboats against a backdrop of soft-coloured old buildings. Every cafe, park bench and patch of grass is taken up by Swedes making the most of the unexpected sunshine. The smell of cinnamon pastries fills the air. Elegant 18th-century palaces and churches decorate a picturesque scatter of rocky islands surrounded by pine forests. The natives all look like models. The Baltic Sea still teems with herring. Why would anyone ever want to leave?

Yet leave they do, some never to return. One of them was my wife's mother, who became a student in London, married and had three children then died young. Olivia, my wife, hasn't been to Stockholm since she was a child.

I book us into the Grand Hotel, on the waterfront opposite the Royal Palace, and ask the head concierge, Okky Widyanto, how to make the most of our time. A bit of shopping, some herrings (obviously), maybe a boat trip on Sunday? Okky says he'll make a few calls. Over breakfast (herrings, obviously, with Swedish cheese and reindeer carpaccio) we decide to follow his first piece of advice – starting with a stroll through Gamla Stan, the ancient heart of the city, all cobbled streets and stone buildings. The architecture is a Swedish mix of the austere and the lavish, stern lines and restrained colours shot through with gilded carvings and baroque flourishes.

Knowing a few Swedes, this architectural contrast strikes me as a fair reflection of the national character. Volvos and Vikings, herrings and aquavit; sensible and crazy at the same time.

Lunchtime brings us to the restored Ostermalmshallen food market. Okky has pulled some strings to book us into one of Stockholm's oldest fish restaurants, Lisa Elmqvist. In a corner of the hall, it's been a piscine paradise for four generations. A basket of sourdough bread, a Nils Oscar God lager and a shot of ice-cold aquavit come with a minimally perfect first course of delicate fish eggs, perfect gravlax and surely the finest herrings in the world. Enough to keep me in Stockholm for a while.

After lunch, Olivia heads to the new Sodermalm district to look at the experimental end of fashion while I take in the Wasa museum with its perfectly preserved ghost of a ship from almost 400 years ago.

Then it's off through the old town to the small island of Riddarholm with guide Inge Andersson. Through a couple of security doors and we are inside the old parliament building, which smells of centuries of floor polish. A service lift takes us to the top floor, then stairs through an attic to a makeshift room unsettlingly hung with mountaineering harnesses and crash helmets.

Harnesses jangling, we climb onto the roof of the parliament building and clip onto a steel wire before stepping onto a metal walkway. Inge's timing is perfect – the setting sun silhouettes the church spires to the west and lights the gilded turrets and windows of Gamla Stan behind us.