Visitors to London last week might have been forgiven for thinking they were in Paris or, perhaps, Madrid in mid-August. While our office was humming with the sounds of fingertips punching keyboards, printers working overtime and the Nespresso machine working even harder, it seemed like the rest of London had almost shut down. In Marylebone High Street it looked like the normally buzzy neighbourhood had been cleared by a film production company for one of those post-apocalypse films that London has a habit of being cast in – no legions of latte-sipping mums pushing prams, no producers from the local BBC radio station smoking cigarettes, no tourists on the hunt for a pub lunch. It made me wonder if London had finally embraced its Latin side and was going to join the southern half of Europe and shutter its windows for all of August.

Back at the office we were trying to shove the September issue of Monocle out the door and off to the printers but it was proving a tricky beast to budge. At some point on Thursday evening (or was it very early on Friday morning?) we found some traction and a bit of grease and by Friday evening the bulk of it was making its way down to Dorset to jump on to the printing press. At this point I was also supposed to be heading west to board a flight to Stockholm but a special survey on Singapore that was accompanying the issue was proving to be a bit fiddly and I decided to give that flight a miss.

You might recall that I had pretty much written off summers in Sweden a few weeks ago after a particularly chilly and rainy patch. But I decided to give it one more shot and organised a weekend for friends from Japan and colleagues from London to venture out to sea and visit the house. It was a 7am-ish start the next morning at Heathrow and the next thing I felt was the jolt of the plane’s flaps deploying. I slid the window shade up, hoping for a blast of sunshine and big Swedish skies, but we were in low cloud and below I could just barely make out some soggy countryside. A few minutes later we touched down on a damp runway and, with house guests in tow, I cheerily suggested that the weather was due to improve later on.

Through passport control and then outside the terminal we found a taxi that looked like it was up for the task (Sweden has an odd taxi set-up that allows customers to choose any cab in a rank rather than having to use the first one in the queue) and made our way to the Baltic in the driving rain. As the clouds darkened, the raindrops got bigger and I saw the weekend washing away I was already drafting the sales pitch to put my house on the market. “Modernist 1960s house with four bedrooms enjoys dazzling views of the Baltic and surrounding Stockholm archipelago. Fitted with nice German mod cons, the house comes complete with a boat, furniture, a stocked fridge and an angry pair of swans who already think they own the joint ... ”

As I was finishing we pulled up at the dock ahead of schedule in the downpour and waited for the taxi boat to round the point and carve across the channel to collect us. At this point the rest of my guests pulled up in another cab and I started running through an activity checklist of what one might do with five Japanese on a small island in early August. The list was coming up worryingly short.

Fortunately the setting, the bird life and the exotic experience of being in the Nordic world proved enough of a distraction for the first few hours. Then, somewhat miraculously, the sun started to poke through the clouds and the island started to transform itself. Guests jumped into swim gear, into kayaks and into the sea and the Swedish summer that I used to adore had returned – even the mercury managed to creep above 21°C.

On Sunday things kicked into high gear with an outdoor breakfast that demanded a photo session by the Lumix-wielding Japanese and then a boat trip to the tiny grocery store on the neighbouring island of Högmarsö. The only community focal point for miles, the store is accompanied by a cute little café that sees blonde families gathering for proper coffees and, weather permitting, sunny sessions reading the Svenska Dagbladet newspaper. Needless to say a crowd of gasping Japanese visitors uttering “sugoi“ (excellent) and “kawai-i“ (cute) were regarded as something of an oddity in this stretch of the archipelago.

Come Monday morning most of the guests headed off to Los Angeles and Tokyo. My mother, my assistant Alex and editor Andrew hung around for what proved to be an even more glorious day with a gentle breeze, cloudless sky, chilled glasses of Chablis and a sun with just the right intensity to allow for a full day of tanning on the jetty. Tuesday miraculously offered more of the same and it seems that the high pressure managed to save my little island in the Baltic from the estate agent for another season.

Tyler Brûlé is editor-in-chief of Monocle
tyler.brule@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/brule