It’s hard to imagine getting blasé about smoked salmon, but I have nearly managed it here in Trondheim. At the hotel’s generous breakfast buffet there’s a special stand, known to us musicians as ‘the salmon station’, where you can get smoked and cured salmon of majestic quality. The salmon chef, or salmonster, if I could call him that, cures it himself to his own recipe. With some mustard sauce, home-made rye crispbread and a spoonful of scrambled egg, it’s a breakfast dish which has people closing their eyes in pleasure.

Fresh salmon tends to be on the menu of most other meals here as well, so we have almost overdosed on salmon in its various guises. It seems that this is a well-known problem historically. One of my Norwegian colleagues was telling me that in the old days in some parts of Norway, labourers would often have it written into their contracts that they were not to be fed salmon more than four times a week.