Norway got a new king on Saturday afternoon, and the country heard his first address at 19:00 - exactly one day after his father's death. Haakon, 53, sat behind a desk with a photograph of Harald V and two lit candles beside it, and began not with the state but with a man.

"I will miss my father, he always managed to make everyone around him feel at ease" - that was the sentence Norwegian media carried. Not a proclamation, not a programme, but a personal statement. A monarch speaking to the nation for the first time usually hides behind formulations; this one chose to speak as a son.

In the same address he congratulated his mother, Queen Sonja, on the fifty-eighth anniversary of her marriage to Harald. The date fell on the day she became a widow. That is a detail no protocol can tidy up, and Haakon did not try to tidy it up.

The new king kept the motto his predecessors carried - "All for Norway". He promises that together with Queen Mette-Marit and Crown Princess Ingrid Alexandra he will build, as he put it, a Norway with room for everyone. A sentence that sounds good anywhere; the question is whether a monarchy running for more than a century can really be changed by a statement.

Here the crown is history in a textbook; in Oslo it is a budget line that gets voted on. And that is exactly why it is interesting that the new king's first move was not a demonstration of power but an admission of loss. An institution that has held the trust of most Norwegians for decades is not sustained by ceremonies - it is sustained by the feeling that the man at the top is a person.

Ingrid Alexandra will be the first queen of Norway in more than six centuries. Haakon has time to prepare that transition, more time than he had himself. The question left hanging in that room with two candles is a different one: how long can a monarchy live on personal affection for whoever happens to be carrying it?