The Almost Nearly Perfect People

by Michael Booth

  Few of us visit Japan or Russia or speak their languages but, though you might not be able to name all of their political leaders, artists, or second-tier cities, I’m guessing you would be able to name at least some. Scandinavia, though, really is terra incognita. The Romans didn’t bother with it. Charlemagne couldn’t care less. As Nordic historian T. K. Derry writes in his history of the region, for literally thousands of years ‘the north remained almost entirely outside the sphere of interest of civilised man’. Even today the lack of interest is deafening. A. A. Gill, writing recently in the Sunday Times, described this part of the world as ‘a collection of countries we can’t tell apart’.

  Part of the reason for our collective blind spot – and I am the first to admit that I was quite fantastically ignorant of the region before I first moved here – is the fact that comparatively few of us ever travel in this part of the world. For all its scenic wonder, the cost of visiting Scandinavia coupled with its discouraging climate (not to mention the continuing existence of France) tend to dissuade most from holidaying here. Where is the travel writing on the North? Waterstones’ shelves are buckling beneath the weight of Mediterranean memoirs – Dipsomaniac Among the Olive Groves, Extra-marital Affairs on Oranges, and so on – but no one, it seems, wants to spend A Year in Turku, or try Driving Over Lingonberries.

  One day, while standing for half an hour waiting to be served at my local chemists (Danish apoteks are run on a monopoly basis so customer service is not a priority), it dawned on me that, for all the glowing Guardian profiles of Sofie Gråbøl (the star of The Killing), for all the articles about Faroese knitwear, and recipes for twenty ways with foraged weeds (and I must put my hand up here, I wrote more than a couple of the latter), the truth is that we learn more from our schoolteachers, televisions and newspapers about the lives of remote Amazonian tribes than we do about actual Scandinavians and how they actually live.

  This is odd because the Danes and Norwegians are our nearest neighbours to the east, the Icelanders our nearest to the north and, in terms of our national character, we have more in common with all of them than we do with the French or Germans: our humour, tolerance, distrust of religious dogma and political authority, honesty, stoicism in the face of dismal weather, social orderliness, poor diet, lack of sartorial elan, and so on. (This versus the emotional incontinence, endemic corruption, banana-skin humour, adolescent temperament, slapdash personal hygiene, exquisite cuisine and elegant tailoring of our southern neighbours.)

  You could even go as far as to argue that we Britons are, essentially, Scandinavians. Well, a bit. The cultural links are undeniably deep and enduring, dating back to the infamous first raid on the monastery at Lindisfarne on 8 January, 793 when, as contemporary records have it, ‘The harrowing inroads of heathen men made lamentable havoc in the church of God in the Holy-island.’

  Viking kings went on to rule a third of Britain – the territory known as the Danelaw – during a period which culminated with that great spell-checker booby trap, Cnut, as undisputed king of all England. Excavations of a ship burial at Sutton Hoo have given plenty of evidence of a Swedish link, too. After they had got the raping and pillaging out of their systems, there is strong evidence that Vikings of various tribes settled amicably among the Anglo Saxons, traded, intermarried and had a major influence on the indigenous population.

  They certainly left their mark on the English language. A Norwegian language professor at Oslo University, Jan Terje Faarlund, recently went as far as declaring English a Scandinavian language, pointing to shared vocabulary, similar verb-then-object word order (as opposed to German grammar), and so on. The division of Yorkshire into north, east and west ‘ridings’ comes from the Viking term for a ‘third’; I am guessing that Yorkshire’s ‘dales’ are of Nordic derivation, too (dal is Danish for valley); and I have often wondered if northern England’s glottal stops are not some kind of linguistic infection from the Danes (who, when they speak, can often sound as if they are swallowing not just most of the consonants in each word, but their very tongues). Then there are some of the days of the week (Wodin or Odin for Wednesday; Thor for Thursday; Freya for Friday), and many place names. The Domesday Book is full of Scandinavian names for settlements: any town ending in ‘-by’ or ‘-thorpe’ (meaning ‘town’ and ‘smaller settlement’) was once a Viking settlement – Derby, Whitby, Scunthorpe, Cleethorpes, and so on. I was born near a town called East Grinstead, whose name, I assume, is of Danish origin (sted meaning ‘place’, and a common Danish town name ending); and in London I used to live five minutes from Denmark Hill, a name which stems from a more recent connection, admittedly: it was once the home of the Danish consort of Queen Anne, the Danish and British royal families having been tightly intertwined by marriage over many centuries.

  Family words – mother (mor), father (far), sister (søster) brother (bror) are all pretty close too, although, sadly in my view, the English never adopted the Scandinavians’ very useful far-far, mor-mor, far-mor, mor-far method of distinguishing between maternal and paternal grandparents.

  ‘Even today Yorkshire farmers can talk to Norwegian farmers about sheep and understand each other,’ Dr Elizabeth Ashman Rowe, a lecturer in Scandinavian History at the University of Cambridge, told me when I asked her about the Viking legacy in Britain. I have heard something similar regarding the ability of the fishermen of Norfolk to make themselves understood by their colleagues from the western coast of Jutland. Rowe also pointed to other cultural links: the influence of Nordic culture on authors ranging from J. R. R. Tolkein to J. K. Rowling, as well as on new age and heavy metal iconography.

  The Scandinavian influence has extended further west too, of course. The Norwegian Viking Leif Ericson discovered America around AD 1000. Admittedly, having failed to see the attraction of Newfoundland he promptly turned around and went home again, but Scandinavian efforts to populate North America were more successful 900 years on when 1.2 million Swedes, along with many Norwegians and some Finns, sailed across the Atlantic. At one point in the 1860s, a tenth of all immigrants arriving in the United States were from Scandinavia, many of them ending up in Minnesota, where the landscape reminded them of home. Today there are said to be almost five million Norwegian Americans and as many Swedish Americans in the States. If it wasn’t for them, we wouldn’t have Uma Thurman and Scarlett Johanssen.

  What makes the current Nordic mania so unlikely is that during the twentieth century the popular cultural influences tended mostly to flow in the opposite direction. Socialise with Scandinavian males of a certain age, for instance, and the conversation will at some point almost certainly turn to the sketches of Monty Python. The women, meanwhile, will share misty-eyed memories of the male cast members of Brideshead Revisited, or of their time working as au pairs in London. All will be familiar with Upstairs Downstairs, Trevor Eve and Not the Nine O’Clock News, and firmly believe Keeping Up Appearances is a documentary of English life. Despite their highly advanced education systems, Scandinavians are addicted to Midsomer Murders. Give them an ivy-clad Cotswold cottage and a fresh corpse and they are in heaven. Even British cabinet reshuffles make the news in Denmark. I wonder how many British cabinet members could name their Danish opposite number?

  Perhaps the vague familiarity, the superficial sameness, is one of the reasons that we in Britain haven’t really cared to get to know anything beyond fictional representations of the Scandinavians. Also, though stereotypical depictions usually include reference to their sexual liberalism and physical beauty, somehow they still manage to project an image of being pious, sanctimonious Lutherans. It is a neat trick to be thought of as being both deeply hot and off-puttingly frigid, isn’t it? And it doesn’t help that the Scandinavians are not very forward when it comes to coming forward: they aren’t ones to boast. It is against their rules (literally, as we will discover). Look up the word ‘reticent’ in the dictionary and you won’t find a picture of an awkward Finn standing in a corner looking at his shoelaces, but you should.


  While I was writing this book, several people – including some Danes and, in particular, many Swedes – expressed genuine bemusement that they would be of the slightest interest to anyone outside Scandinavia. ‘Why do you think people will want to know about us?’ they asked. ‘What is there to know?’ ‘We are all so boring and stiff.’ ‘There must be more interesting people in the world to write about. Why don’t you go to southern Europe?’ It seems Scandinavians tend to regard themselves rather as we do, a bit like bottle banks: functional and worthy, but plagued by an unremitting dullness which tends to discourage further investigation. Industrious, trustworthy and politically correct, the Scandinavians are the actuary at the party, five countries’ worth of local government Liberal Democrats, finger-wagging social workers, and humourless party poopers.

  So, how do I hope to hold your attention for the duration of this book? The short answer is that I find the Danes, Swedes, Finns, Icelanders, and even the Norwegians, utterly fascinating, and I suspect you will, too, once you find out the truth about how brilliant and progressive, but also how downright weird, they can be. As Oprah would have discovered had she stayed longer than an afternoon, and I have finally, grudgingly, begun to concede, there is so very much more to learn from the Nordic lands – about how they live their lives, the priorities they make and how they handle their wealth; about how societies can function better and more fairly; how people can live their lives in balance with their careers, educate themselves effectively, and support each other. About how, in the final analysis, to be happy. They are funny, too. And not always intentionally, either, which as far as I am concerned is the very best kind of funny.

  I dug a little deeper into the Nordic miracle. Was there a Scandinavian template for a better way of living? Were there elements of Nordic exceptionalism – as the phenomenon has been termed – that were transferable, or was it location-specific, a quirk of history and geography? And, if people outside of Scandinavia really knew what it was like to actually live in this part of the world, would they still envy the Danes and their brethren quite so much?

  ‘If you had to be reborn anywhere in the world as a person with average talents and income, you would want to be a Viking,’ proclaimed The Economist, ever so slightly backhandedly, in a special Nordic-themed edition. But where were the discussions about Nordic totalitarianism and how uptight the Swedes are; about how the Norwegians have been corrupted by their oil wealth to the point where they can’t even be bothered to peel their own bananas; how the Finns are self-medicating themselves into oblivion; how the Danes are in denial about their debt, their vanishing work ethic, and their place in the world; and how the Icelanders are, essentially, feral?

  Once you begin to look more closely at the Nordic societies and their people, once you go beyond the Western media’s current Scandinavian tropes – the Sunday supplement features on Swedish summer houses peopled by blonde women in floral print dresses carrying baskets of wild garlic and surrounded by children with artfully mussed hair – a more complex, often darker, occasionally quite troubling picture begins to emerge. This encompasses everything from the relatively benign downsides to living among such comfortable, homogenous, egalitarian societies as these (in other words, when everyone earns the same amount of money, lives in the same kinds of homes, dresses the same, drives the same cars, eats the same food, reads the same books, has the same opinion about knitwear and beards, broadly similar religious beliefs, and goes to the same places on their holidays, things can get just a teensy bit dull – see the chapters on Sweden for more on this), to the more serious fissures in Nordic society: the racism and Islamophobia, the slow decline of social equality, the alcoholism, and the vast, over-stretched public sectors which require levels of taxation which would be deemed utterly preposterous by anyone who hasn’t had them slowly creep up on them over the last fifty years like a deadly tide choking off all hope, energy and ambition . . .

  . . . Where was I? Anyway, so, yes, I decided to go on a journey to try to fill in some of the gaps in my Nordic experience. I set off to explore these five lands in more depth, revisiting each of them several times, meeting with historians, anthropologists, journalists, novelists, artists, politicians, philosophers, scientists, elf-watchers and Santa Claus.

  The trip would ultimately take me from my home in the Danish countryside to the frigid waters of the Norwegian Arctic, to the fearful geysers of Iceland and the badlands of the most notorious Swedish housing estate; from Santa’s grotto to Legoland, and from the Danish Riviera to the Rotten Banana.

  But the first lesson before I set off, offered, following a long pause and a deep sigh, by a Danish diplomat friend who had patiently endured a speech by me encompassing much of the above, was that, technically speaking, neither the Finns nor the Icelanders were actually Scandinavians: that term refers to the people of the original Viking lands, Denmark, Sweden and Norway, only. But, as I discovered on my travels round the region, the Finns have reserved the right to opt in or out of the old marauders’ club as and when it suits them, and I don’t think the Icelanders would be too upset to be labelled Scandinavians either. Strictly speaking, if we are going to lump all five countries together we really ought to use the term ‘Nordic’. But this is my book and so I reserve the right to bandy both terms about pretty much interchangeably.

  So let us begin on our quest to unearth the truth about the Nordic miracle, and where better to start than at a party.

  DENMARK

  Chapter 1

  Happiness

  AS THE RAINCLOUDS finally part to reveal an electric blue, early-evening sky, we venture out of the marquee sniffing the cool, damp air like nervous rescue animals, turning to savour the last warmth of the vanishing sun. It casts a pinky glow which, as the evening continues, transforms into a magical white, midsummer light and, finally, a deep dark blue-black backdrop for a planetarium-style celestial display.

  Midsummer’s Eve is one of the highlights of the Scandinavian calendar; pagan in origin but highjacked by the Church and renamed in honour of ‘Sankt Hans’ (St John). In Sweden they will be dancing around maypoles garlanded with flowers; in Finland and in Norway they will have gathered around bonfires. Here in Denmark, in the garden of my friend’s summer house north of Copenhagen, the beer and cocktails are flowing. At ten o’clock we gather around a fire to sing ‘Vi Elsker Vort Land’ (‘We Love Our Country’) and other stirring, nationalistic hymns. An effigy of a witch, assembled from old gardening clothes and a broomstick, is burned, sending her – my friend’s eight-year-old daughter informs me – off to the Hartz Mountains in Germany.

  The Danes are masters of revels such as these. They take their partying very seriously, are enthusiastic boozers, committed communal singers, and highly sociable when among friends. They give good fest, as they call it. This one boasts two barmen, two large grills with a variety of slowly caramelising pig parts and, later, there will be the all-important nat mad, or midnight snacks – sausages, cheese, bacon and bread rolls – served to soak up the alcohol and see us through to sunrise.

  As is often the case, I find the searing anthropological insights begin to kick in around about my third gin and tonic. It occurs to me that this midsummer’s party is the perfect place to commence my dissection of the Danish happiness phenomenon, my friend’s get-together exemplifying as it does so many of the characteristics of Danish society that I find admirable, and which I believe contribute to their much-vaunted contentedness. As I stand here beside the bonfire’s dying embers, I begin to tick some of them off.

  One is the mood here in this lush green garden surrounded by high beech hedges, with the obligatory flagpole flying a large, red-and-white Dannebrog at its entrance. Though the drink has been flowing, the atmosphere is relaxed, there are no raised voices, no hints of alcohol-fuelled fightiness.

  Then there are the children haring about the place. Danish children are granted what, to British eyes, can seem an almost old-fashioned freedom to roam and to take risks, and
it is natural that the youngsters present this evening are as much a part of the party as the adults. They are still haring about as midnight approaches, yelling and screaming, hiding and seeking, buzzing and crashing on Coca-Cola and hot dogs.

  Most of the people assembled here will have left work early; not sneaking out ‘to go to a meeting’, or feigning illness, but straightforwardly informing their bosses that they will be attending a party an hour north along the coast, and that they will need to leave work early to prepare. Their bosses – if they haven’t already left themselves for the same reason – will have been at ease with this. The Danes have a refreshingly laid-back approach to their work–life balance which, as we will see, has had major consequences – both positive (the happiness) and potentially negative (sometimes you do really need to buckle down and do some work: during a global recession, for example). I have met few ‘live to work’ types in this country; indeed many Danes – particularly those who work in the public sector – are frank and unapologetic about their ongoing efforts to put in the barest minimum hours required to support lives of acceptable comfort. The Danes work almost half the number of hours per week they did a century ago, and significantly fewer than the rest of Europe: 1,559 hours a year compared with the EU average of 1,749 hours (although the Greeks work 2,032 hours so, clearly, this is not a cast-iron measure of productivity). According to a 2011 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) study encompassing thirty countries, the Danes were second only to the Belgians in the laziness stakes – that’s globally.

  In practice this means that most people knock off at around four or five in the afternoon, few feel pressurised to work at weekends, and you can forget about getting anything done after 1 p.m. on a Friday. Annual leave is often as much as six weeks and, during July, the entire country shuts down as the Danes migrate en masse, like mild-mannered wildebeest, to their summer houses, caravan parks or campsites located an hour or so away from where they live.