For those of you who know that I live in Sweden much of the time, and who may have been alarmed by yesterday’s report – from the President of the United States, no less – that we’ve just had an Islamicist massacre here, I’d like to reassure you that I’m quite unscathed. – Here’s Trump, in Melbourne, Florida:

‘You look at what’s happening in Germany, you look at what’s happening all over the world. Take a look at Nice. Take a look at Paris. You look at what’s happening in Brussels. You look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe it! Sweden.’

Well! Who would believe it, indeed. Obviously our liberal Swedish media is as adept at hiding these atrocities as the American.

As it happens we went into Stockholm city centre on the night in question, to see an operatic stageing of Lars-Erik Larsson’s Förklädd Gud (God in Disguise) at Folksoperan. We should have been nervous, I suppose, when we learned that a number of the performers were beggars, exiles and Roma taken from the streets, many of them undoubtedly Muslims. But none of them turned on us. The performance was set in the context of Sweden’s recent extraordinarily generous Middle Eastern refugee policy: a sign, the piece was saying, of that ‘disguised God’ in all of us. The music is glorious (there’s a good version of the original here, with Kurt Wallander [!] as the narrator: www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkN2Gbe1aD8), and the whole occasion was very moving. It reminded me of why I like living here.

The Swedish papers have had great fun at the expense of Trump’s silly lie. Here’s one reaction, from the tabloid Aftonbladet: http://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/Vn17J/in-english-this-happened-in-sweden-friday-night-mr-president.

I like the randy moose story. I don’t suppose he was a Moslem ‘in disguise’?