A Swedish lake, when it freezes, shouts about it all night. Creaks and groans rend the air and, between the occasional brutal cracking sound, the lake grinds its teeth as if in unbearable pain. Stand on the crust and you feel the whole surface shudder.

I am in a one-room wood cabin in the forests of central Sweden. Without telephone, light or power one is quickly absorbed into the land and the season. Pine, spruce and birch, ruler-straight, clothe a seeming infinity of low hills. Pale moss, almost colourless, carpets the forest floor. Rivers, unfrozen, are black. The landscape seems to crouch, low, numbed, beneath a flat white sky, and there is a fearsome deadness to the scene: inert, windless, drained of warmth and colour like a poisoned planet. Snow floats down ceaselessly in tiny, suffocating specks of white ash. Nothing else moves; nothing breathes; nothing sings.

Except the lake. I have been listening to it, all night. Lying in my sleeping bag I heard a low rumbling, then a crash and then a sort of ricochet. Again and again these sounds came until I ventured outside and stood on a frozen jetty. Crack! It was like a whip. Then from somewhere in the gloom on the opposite shore came a noise like a grumbling stomach; then another crack, this time closer. And from all around the lake, now here, now there, the rumbling growl. One felt a sense of building internal tension, huge forces, waiting for something to snap. With no animal life except for us and the hibernating bears, no birds or insects, the lake was tensing its muscles as the biggest living thing around.

The temperature was dropping. The night sky had cleared and cold stars were out. I concluded that the whole body of water was probably hovering around zero. Any sudden cooling from above would produce a rapid icing, thick enough to create unbearable strains as plates expanded and ground against each other. One such had torn and lifted the end of the jetty. It was a small taste of what Ernest Shacketon and his men must have heard and felt as their ship froze into the ocean and was crushed.

Some of my companions here are old new Labour missionaries. They too exude a sense of impending ice age. We talk about the old days, and what they saw as the new dawn after 1997. As Iraq fades as a national issue, I sense that a market is beginning in nostalgia for the Blair years and the ancien régime.

I wonder if 2008 will be the year for retro new Labour: women in bright, sharp-cut jackets in primary colours with pashminas thrown over their shoulders; men in those rich, showily conservative ties, toying with their pagers and PalmPilots. The Folletts, Ken and Barbara, will come back into supper-party fashion, and true believers will keep tiny photographs of Peter Mandelson pinned to the inside of their lapels. People will play Oasis and D:Ream.

Tony Blair, of course, is younger than the present Prime Minister. Will he come to Labour's conference in Manchester this autumn? By summer, people will be asking. What would it mean if he did come? What would it mean if he didn't?

I wonder who — it will certainly not be me — will be the first to speculate on a comeback? A seat could always be found...

This country — Sweden — is a mystery I cannot begin to crack.

We think of Swedes as a flexible, tolerant and accommodating people, and of their culture as permissive; and everyone is immensely polite and pleasant. But if one drives the long and empty roads through a relentlessly uniform landscape, passing sparse wayside settlements indistinguishable one from another, and goes by the evidence of eyes alone, an impression settles of an almost suffocating rigidity.

All the houses are the same designs and colours — rust-red, ochre-yellow or cream — and in each window at this season (almost literally each window) stands an electric candlestick, its seven points arranged in a shallow pyramid. The house with only one of these is unusual. No house has anything else. There are no coloured lights, only white. I found myself, despite myself, longing for one of those dreadful multicoloured illuminated Father Christmases climbing into just one chimney — the thrilling hint that somebody might want to show off, or get one up on his neighbours.

I wonder whether a flat white sky, black rivers, and an infinity of ruler-straight trees can enter a nation's soul? It is very beautiful in its way.

I offended many with my Christmas attack on cyclists. It was meant humorously but so many cyclists have taken it seriously that I plainly misjudged. I am sorry.

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