Stockholm, Sweden.

At Mälarpaviljongen, a strange and beautiful gay-owned bar and restaurant based on a rambling pontoon under the trees that floats out on Lake Mälaren and which, on a summer night like this in summer night city, is buzzing with LGBTQs and even straight folk.

On a night like this, everyone is knocking back their special rosé, a purchase that helps fund good works for LGBTQ communities across the world. They even make a point of employing and training up LGBTQ refugees at Mälarpaviljongen, to help them get a foot on the European ladder. Not that we’re here just to do good works, you understand.

In summer in Stockholm, it never gets dark. Never quite. It’s why you’ll find people out at all hours, especially over there in the old town where not a single modern building spoils the illusion that you’re still in the 17th century. They’ll be walking about the grand square maybe having a coffee with a cinnamon bun at Chokladkoppen, a cute pocket-size old-school chocolate house with low ceilings, filament bulb lighting and which just happens to be the first place in Stockholm to fly the rainbow flag as a matter of course. If they’re not wandering about, they’ll be sitting out at cafés while people tell them stories from a perch under a neighbouring tree.

Or, on a night like this, you might be up on the rooftop champagne bar at Södra Teatern, a 19th century music hall with seven stages and three terraces looking out, through the cranes (always a good sign that a city is booming, remember) towards the sunset. Everyone has played here from Leonard Cohen to Red Hot Chili Peppers, but we’re very much here for the food (a medley of different asparaguses with garlic dip) and the rooftop views.

Stockholm – get ready for the geography bit – is often called the Venice of the North because there’s water everywhere you look. On one side is a freshwater lake – where that Mälarpaviljongen place means you can actually swim away from it if you’ve haven’t over-rosé-ed, and on the other the Baltic Sea, and an archipelago, which means a scattering of three thousand islands, some just big enough for a bird’s nest and some grass, that you have a legal right to go onto whether or not they’re private.

You can take a speedy speed boat called a RIB right down through them and have a rosé (proceeds NOT going to LGBTQ charities) at the end while you watch the sunset (not that it ever quite sets in summer, remember) or even stay at glamping spots in little bell tents with wood burners and outdoor showers at Island Lodge just 40 minutes from the hustle and bustle of Stockholm, a proper working city of one million or two million, depending on how many suburbs you want to include.

And that means boats are very much part of the deal, like the ones run by Blidösundsbolaget, down in front of the royal palace. Jazz boats, party boats, LGBTQ party boats, they’re all part of the midsummer madness, though, bear in mind, on Midsummer Night’s Eve, a very big deal around these parts, people leave the city for the islands of the archipelago, where they have strange flower rituals and love to sit out drinking and singing and shouting and getting off with each other.

Back in town, which is as elegant and well-run as you would imagine, they like to say that the streets are narrow but the minds are open, one of the reasons they’ve never really needed a gaybourhood and have spread gay venues like Club King Kong, lesbian club Moxy and Secret Garden across the city.

It has some international quality hotels like The Diplomat and quirkier ones like the Haymarket, an old art deco department store where Swedish actress Greta Garbo once sold hats. And while you’re in that part of town, there’s all the shopping your heart could desire and maybe even afford in the Biblioteksgatan shopping district, where the likes of H&M and Tiger (both Swedish remember) rub padded shoulders with amazing Swedish design brands like Byredo and Sandqvist, both certainly deserving of your krona.

“So why are Swedes very like the Brits?” asks the Chinese-American tomboy, who has somehow kept on topic through this whole, rambling digression though she did have to nip off halfway through because she left her £10,000 camera on a seat over there and, to her disbelief, no one nicked it.

“Oh,” says the chic older woman-in-black, coming back to her point. “We have the same sense of humour, we’re tolerant – though I hate that word. How dare anyone tolerate me? And…” She starts tapping her fingernail on the rim of her glass to get another slosh of that philanthropic rose in there: “…we like a drink.”