Velkommen til Bergen

Bergen is the mother's choice for a short family holiday to celebrate her 70th. Good, because my sister and I soon realised visiting Norway is a challenge financially without parents generously paying for hotels and food using their civil service pensions. Millennials can talk as much as they like about unequal distribution of wealth across the generations, but it's permitted this trip to take place, and I bloody needed a rest from work.

I especially needed a rest after pulling an all-nighter to meet a deadline, before packing scrappily and taking a dawn walk to the station. The much trumpeted new and direct Cambridge to Brighton train that would have spat me out at Gatwick Airport was mysteriously absent from any timetable, so I did the usual loitering and train changing around Kings Cross and St Pancras, clamouring for coffee from equally bleary-eyed baristas.

'That's the wettest city in Europe,' I was told earlier this week when I proffered that I was going to Bergen. Lord, have mercy on my soul. The weather forecast confirmed the worst, and I found out there are 300 days per year with rain and an annual total of 2250 millimetres. By comparison, Manchester, which feels endlessly grey and wet when you live there, receives 800.

Norway immigration officials are the friendliest and burliest that you might find, and the airport was briskly efficient with a faint aroma of smoked fish, as if it had been piped through. I met my sister in arrivals in Bergen as she had flown in from Manchester via Inverness on a small plane where she was the only one not destined for the rigs.

Later in the city centre the parents joined by train from Oslo, and the weather was wild. Mum had packed only shorts and sandals because 'it should be warm.' I don't think changeable and wet Bergen cares too much about forecasts, but the mother's logic is the kind that I can see myself applying. She's equally a sun worshipper and in decades gone by, could be found lying on a sun lounger slathered in Piz Buin Factor 0 whenever a patch of sunlight appeared at the back door.

The Fish Market is in the centre of the city, and as a restaurant choice it would have been better saved for a night with less lashing rain. However with pools of water around our feet and wrapped in blankets we ate fresh fish and my sister freaked out at the presence of prawn roe. We warmed ourselves up afterwards on apple cake and hot chocolate in a cosy pub.