31
You would have liked this one, Dad.
So it’s for you.
An unusual business strategy
Daydreaming in the reception area of one of Sweden’s most wretched hotels stood a man whose life would soon come to be filled with death and bodily harm, thieves and bandits.
The only grandchild of horse-dealer Henrik Bergman was, as always, channelling his paternal grandfather’s shortcomings. The old man had been foremost in his field in southern Sweden; he never sold fewer than seven thousand animals per year, and each was first-class.
But from 1955, the traitorous farmers began to exchange Grandfather’s cold- and warmbloods for tractors at a rate that Grandfather refused to comprehend. Seven thousand transactions became seven hundred, which became seventy, which became seven. Within five years, the family’s multi-million-krona fortune had gone up in a cloud of diesel smoke. In 1960, the as-yet-unborn grandson’s dad tried to save what he could by travelling around to all the farmers in the region and preaching on the curse of mechanization. After all, there were so many rumours flying about. Such as how diesel fuel would cause cancer if it got on your skin and, of course, get on your skin it did.
And then Dad added that studies showed diesel could cause sterility in men. But he really shouldn’t have mentioned that. For one thing,