Sven and Ulrika: Alastair's Match of the Day

I won't call it Alastair Campbell's finest moment because there's something faintly demeaning about pimping, although the hours are okay and some of us still look good in crushed velvet... but there is something of genius in his matchmaking of Sven and Ulrika, which hit every front page when we should still have been arguing taxes. It's hard to think of a romantic confection to better delight today's Britain, until the triumphant day when Al finally gets Tony and Anthea together: and some may see it as slightly sordid - in order that we may learn precisely how sordid, the midnight oil's being burned this weekend by London's usual team of weasel-faced chisellers, known as 'lawyers' - but I think it's all rather sweet.

Sweet because of the Swedishness. They must have fallen on each other like a long drink of cool, sparkling, ruinously expensive water. We hear much about Britain's proud multicultural history, and how many disparate races long to come here, but we seldom think what it must be like for those who came not from the ravages of some despot but from... a nice place.

How the pair must have been missing Sweden, Swedes and all things Swedish. To have come from a land so clean you can eat your Ikea meatballs off the pavements - and wake to the slow realisation that London was not after all, during that first week, having a special Festival of Poo. To walk through streets filled not with slim golden bicyclists but with grim knuckle-trailing spittle-flecked troglodytes (and that, folks - wait for it - is just the women). To have to listen revoltedly to the foul shouts from the terraces, rather than the pleasant chats between crowds at home, possibly involving a wry anecdote about Tør's goose and a wicker basket, and accompanied by some neighbourly cheese-swapping. To yearn for the innocent days, before hip hop, when they would go jiggy-jiggy to grøøvy sounds down at the disco ('Hello I am having the name Sven do you too like the pop of the group Abba yes?').

And before you start, it's okay to be gently rude: I checked. According to a letter to the New York Times a couple of years ago - I am not making this up - Swedes can poke fun at themselves and do not in any way lack a sense of humour: 'We enjoy Øle and Lena jokes, and Lutheran church basement jokes.'

And it explains a lot, about the failed romances. They tried, both tried - with sexy Italian lawyers, with playboys and with princes - and it was all doomed, because the only better life was ever going to be a Swedish life with the girl or boy next door. A life of idyll, a life of joy: a life spent sharing dry crispbread from the cycle panniers during an exciting visit to the statue commemmorating the man who invented the self-cleaning paper-punch; a life spent whipping each other joyfully with birch-twigs in church basements; a life ending delightfully in an alcohol-fuelled suicide pact in the dark weeping trees above Ingmar Bergman's grave, silent but for the softly falling snø.