‘Danes even have separate summer and winter cushions,’ she tells me. ‘There’s a big market for them here – when money’s tight and you can’t quite stretch to a new piece of furniture, you can spend 500 kroner on a great cushion that will make your room look fresh.’ Upwards of £50, or $90, for a cushion? This still seems pretty steep to me, and I wonder whether I’m too tight for this oh-so-stylish country.
‘So does the average Dane spend a lot on their home?’ I ask.
‘I think we probably do prioritise spending on design,’ says Charlotte. ‘Figures from before the financial crisis showed that we were the nation that spent the most money on furniture in the world, per capita. Plus Danes really value good design, craft and quality. We want to buy something we can use for many years and pass down to our children.’ She mentions a few of the big names in Danish design, from Arne Jacobsen to Finn Juhl and Poul Henningsen – names I’m vaguely familiar with having spoken to Anne-Louise and from the pages of Lego Man’s deco-porn. I’d struggle to identify their work or pick a Poul Henningsen lamp out of a line-up at this stage, but Charlotte tells me that most Danes are pretty clued up on their designers.
‘Everyone in Denmark knows who Arne Jacobsen is and about his work – not just design fans,’ she says. The idea that design is part of the national consciousness helps me to understand why the Danish homes we’ve seen look as though they’re straight out of a newspaper lifestyle supplement. I learn that Poul Henningsen’s lamps are so popular here that 50 per cent of Danes have at least one in their home. ‘People feel good about supporting Danish brands,’ Charlotte explains. ‘They want something that’s been hand-made here. Our design is something we celebrate and can be proud of, so yes, we do spend on it. And since the 1960s when more Danes began owning their own homes and both men and women worked, we’ve been able to afford to spend more money on furniture and design.’
Conscious of Lego Man listening in and champing at the bit to bring our ‘emergency’ UK credit card into play, I ask Charlotte to recommend five key Danish design touches that will sate my in-house Scandophile and help make our home hygge. She rises, stylishly, to the challenge.
‘I’d start with a great wooden dining table for your daily meals, as well as talking and relaxing around,’ she begins. I’m just feeling smug about the oak six-seater we already own when she adds, ‘And in Denmark this should normally have at least eight chairs so you can have lots of people round.’ Shit. We’re clearly not sociable enough. ‘Two more chairs,’ I write down, ‘and possibly a bigger table.’ Lego Man’s eyes light up.
‘Then I’d invest in a hand-crafted chair like an Arne Jacobsen or a Hans Wegner or a Børge Mogensen,’ Charlotte goes on. ‘Your average Danish home might also have a designer lamp like Poul Henningsen’s PH or an Arne Jacobsen AJ from Louis Poulsen. Then there’s the Kubus candleholder – this is typically Danish and a lot of homes have this. And then finally, well, I’d probably go for some Royal Copenhagen dining plates,’ she adds. I look over at our off-white Ikea crockery in a pile next to the dishwasher and see that we have work to do.
‘Right,’ I reply brightly, resolving to un-Ikea our home. ‘And all this great design really makes Danes happy?’ I ask. Lego Man already has an arm in a coat and is searching for the car keys to begin his retail therapy.
‘I think so, yes,’ says Charlotte. ‘When we surround ourselves with quality design, it influences our mood. If our surroundings are nice, we feel cosy and safe. It makes us happier.’
I ask if she’s happy herself. ‘Oh yes, I’d say a nine out of ten – there’s always a little room for something more.’
‘Like what?’ I can’t help asking.
‘That’s personal,’ she replies. I worry I’ve offended her by prying but she soon relents and reveals all. ‘I’d like to live by the ocean and I’d like my boyfriend to propose. Then I’d be a ten.’
I thank Charlotte and say goodbye. Then I look at my husband, now wrestling a boot onto a foot, silhouetted against a panoramic view of a picture-perfect, dusky pink seascape. Maybe I should start my happiness project by trying to be more grateful for what I’ve got, I think, fondly. Then Lego Man writes ‘HURRY UP!!!’ on a Post-It and sticks it to my forehead. The bubble bursts and I swiftly dismiss the idea of spending the next twelve months cherishing his every wet-towels-on-the-bed and inability-to-locate-the-laundry-basket foible. Instead, I grab my coat and go.
We Shop. With a capital ‘S’. In spite of Allan with two ‘l’s from the bank. Lego Man is already happier once his new purchases are installed, and over the next few days our house starts to look more like a home. I try to think positively, too, but my own Pollyanna project suffers some setbacks.
I make my first Danish faux pas by putting paper into the wrong recycling bin. This leads to my inaugural interaction with our new neighbours, when two bearded gents call round at eight o’clock on Monday morning. I’m not yet dressed and haven’t even had a chance to turn on the coffee machine, meaning I’m in no state to receive visitors. But Mr & Mr Beard aren’t going anywhere. They ring the doorbell insistently until, living in a glass house where there’s nowhere to hide, I have no choice but to answer. Huddled in anoraks and blinking behind surprisingly non-Scandi milk-bottle glasses, they start to speak in Danish before I explain that I haven’t yet learned their fine tongue. Eventually they relent. Mr Beard I tells me in halting English that ‘the neighbours’ (collective) have noticed that the recycling bin has been more full than usual and so have been through the rubbish to discover the culprit. Mr Beard II holds aloft a tea-stained utilities bill addressed to Lego Man as evidence. Once I get over the weirdness of the fact that my new neighbours have been going through our bin (or their bin, as it turns out), I politely ask where it is they’d like me to deposit my waste paper. They point to an identical bin to the one I had been using, only a few feet further to the left.
Chastened, I promise to do better next time and get a free lesson in waste separation. The Danes, it turns out, are admirably obsessive about recycling. Almost 90 per cent of packaging is recycled and paper, cans, bottles, food and organic waste all have separate recycling homes. Sorting out what goes where is an art form I have yet to master, but I do work out that the Tardis-type booth at the local supermarket is for bottles. We pop one in on the off-chance one afternoon and marvel at the ad hoc laser show that commences. The bottle is scanned for its reuse value before the magical machine spits out a voucher, paying us the equivalent of 12p or 20 cents towards our next shop. I am disproportionately excited by this.
It’s not just Prius drivers, hemp-fans and hipsters who are passionate about the environment in Denmark. Being eco-friendly here is seen as a basic duty and something you do to be a part of Danish society. Inspired by the fervour of my neighbours, I go on a fact-finding mission and discover that Denmark was the first country in the world to establish an official environment ministry, back in 1971. Today, the Danish clean power industry is one of the most competitive in the world and the country gets 30 per cent of its electricity from wind. In 2013, Denmark won the World Wildlife Fund’s most prestigious award, Gift to the Earth, for inspiring leadership with the world’s most ambitious renewable energy and climate targets. It has also been voted the most climate-friendly country by the United Nations’ Climate Change Performance Index for the past two years. The Danish government aims to reduce CO2 emissions by 40 per cent by 2020 and the environment ministry has a collective goal for a ‘Denmark without waste’ by 2050 – when they hope that everything will be reused or recycled. At a time when most countries are reneging on their environmental promises, Danes are setting themselves tougher and tougher targets, and they’re on course to meet them.
Impressed, I resolve to perform my civic recycling duties rigorously and with pride in future, and am keen to inform Messrs Beard & Beard of this when they call round a week later to check I’ve been putting my cans in the correct bin. They nod in acknowledgement of my environmental epiphany then shuf
fle off again as fast as they can.
Other than this, no one speaks to us. If I was expecting the happiest country on earth to be welcoming, I was mistaken. I miss London. I miss noise. Instead of working to the sound of 747 engines whirring their way along the Heathrow flight path, or ear-piercing sirens speeding past to pick up London’s criminal not-so-elite, I now hear birdsong, tractors or, worse, nothing. The place is so still and silent that the soundtrack to my day is often the ringing of long-forgotten tinnitus, acquired during an adolescence spent at bad gigs. Our dog finally arrives from the UK but gets so spooked by the deer, hares and foxes currently inhabiting our garden that he immediately retreats to the laundry room. Here, he whimpers and can only be comforted by a full load on spin cycle. Then, once we’ve finally got him settled, we’re kept awake three nights running by owls.
I miss my friends, and find that moaning about owls to them over FaceTime isn’t nearly so much fun as moaning to them about owls over wine. I was prepared for the fact that we’d be starting over. We’d convinced ourselves that this would be ‘liberating’, forcing us to try new things and meet new people and broadening our horizons. But this doesn’t seem quite so appealing when we find ourselves sitting at home, alone, again, wondering how to kick-start our Danish social life.
‘If Denmark has a population the size of South London,’ I tell Lego Man, ‘and we reduce our catchment area to, say, a twenty-kilometre radius of where we live and narrow it down to people within a two-decade age bracket, the number of people we may actually like gets even smaller. In other words, if the friendship pond is already tiny, we’re not going to like all the pond life we meet.’
‘Right,’ says Lego Man, looking unsure. I wait for him to counter this and tell me that everything’s going to be all right. But he doesn’t. Instead he says: ‘You should also bear in mind that they might not like us. They might have enough friends already, like we did back home.’ Great. Now I feel much better…
‘It’ll be OK,’ Lego Man says eventually, shuffling closer towards me on the sofa and putting his arm around me. ‘We just need to get to know the place better. You should get out and about more, meet people.’ He’s probably right. Working from home and socialising via Skype and FaceTime isn’t good for a girl. But then neither is Sticksville-on-Sea’s public transport system. Having suffered frostbite and fury at the mercy of infrequent buses and trains since Lego Man started commuting to work with our sole mode of transport, a leased Lego-mobile, I decide that the time has come to buy my own car out here.
Coming from the UK, I have it relatively easy in terms of hitting the Danish roads. Most internationals from outside of the EU are forced to take a test before they can drive here. Regulations came into force in 2013 allowing new arrivals from countries deemed to ‘have a level of road safety comparable to Denmark’ to simply swap their licences, but there are conditions attached. Applicants have to have taken their test after the age of eighteen (ruling out most Americans who take their tests at sixteen) and need to have had a clean driving record for the past five years.
In common with everything else in Denmark, motoring isn’t cheap. New cars have a sales tax of 180 per cent, making them cost about three times the amount that they would back home. This means that a simple hatchback that might fetch £10,000 in the UK (or $17,000 in USD) retails at the equivalent of £30,000 in Denmark ($50,000) – and the inflated costs trickle down to used car prices.
‘Is this why most people drive matchboxes?’ I ask Lego Man, when these alarming new discoveries have sunk in.
‘I suspect so. Are you going to be OK out there? Car shopping, I mean?’
‘Sure,’ I tell him, sounding not at all sure but feeling as though this is probably something a grown woman in the 21st century should be able to handle.
Feeling courageous, I venture to the nearest car dealership. Having discovered that a return flight to London is cheaper than a twenty-minute cab ride anywhere in Jutland, I’m resigned to taking the bus again. Two hours later and relatively unscathed, I arrive in the showroom and am rewarded with the aroma of pleather, car air fresheners and cheap aftershave.
My price threshold rules out every car in the place bar two. The first is a scratched-up tin box on wheels that looks and smells like a family of feral cats have been living in it, relieving themselves regularly. The second, a cheery, tomato-red number, reminds me of a mobility scooter. I’m not instantly enamoured, but after a pootle around the block I find that a) the thing goes and b) my lofty driving position means that I can look down on other motorists. A novelty for a 5′3″ Brit in a land of Vikings.
‘I’ll take it,’ I tell the dealer, who hands me a nine-page document – in Danish. I ask if I can take this away with me to interpret it or at least have some quality time with it in the vicinity of a Danish-to-English dictionary. But instead, he offers to translate for me. I’m not convinced that this is normal, but having been assured by my guidebook that there are fair trading rules for second-hand car dealers in Denmark and that salesmen don’t get paid commission, I figure I’m unlikely to get ripped off. The guy has little to lose by being straight with me. In for a penny, in for a krone, I think.
So I thank him and he runs me through the deal. But it includes several more zeros than expected.
‘What’s this for?’ I point at an alarming row of virtual hugs on page four.
‘Oh, that’s for the winter tyres.’
It’s not just cushions that get a seasonal update in Denmark, it turns out. Winter tyres, though not mandatory, are advised. Shelling out a further 5,000 DKK (roughly £580 or $850 USD) for wheels that won’t send me headlong into a ditch on unfamiliar roads in sub-zero temperatures seems like money well spent. I point at another line of digits and ask what it relates to.
‘This is for fitting your summer tyres and storing your winter tyres in the tyre hotel from spring.’ The tyres get their own hotel in Denmark? My God, living standards really are through the roof.
‘And do I really need this?’ I ask.
‘We recommend that tyres are stored somewhere secure and fitted by someone who knows what they’re doing,’ is his reply.
‘Right…’ I wonder whether I might be able to make a saving by using a) Lego Man and b) the shed. I decide to risk it.
Sales Man points out another number: ‘Then this is for the number plate—’
‘—The number plate’s not included?’
‘No!’ he sounds faintly amused. ‘Otherwise everyone would know how old your car was!’
‘Are you serious?’
His smile drops, leaving me in no doubt that he is entirely serious. ‘Every driver gets new plates with numbers and letters generated at random.’
Equality, it turns out, is so important in Denmark that the authorities don’t even want anyone judged by the age of their car. This seems commendable, but I’m pretty sure that anyone with half a brain will guess that my mobility tomato isn’t the latest in high-end automotive design. And I rather resent having to pay to pretend otherwise.
‘Then there’s also registration tax, green tax, countervailing tax…’ I can almost feel Allan with two ‘l’s’ disapproving glare and imagine him shaking his head with disappointment as I sign swiftly and leave.
Over the next few days, I discover that the mobility tomato rattles if it goes above 70km per hour, makes a high-pitched bleeping noise unless I have Danish public radio tuned in and has windscreen wipers that merely move the dirt from side to side, smearing it across my field of view. But it’s mine. All mine. The adventures start here.
* * *
Things I’ve learned this month:
Denmark is really, really cold in January
Money may not buy you happiness, but it can buy you cars, candlesticks and exceedingly good cakes
Owls are LOUD
Being an immigrant is not for sissies
2. February
Forgetting the 9–5
One of the advantages to going freelance, eve
ryone told me, was that I could work in my pyjamas and wear slippers on the commute from bed to the laptop. After a decade of four-inch heels and dry-clean-only dresses, this seemed a bizarre and alien concept – a strange new world that I was interested to hear about but had no real intention of visiting. A bit like Las Vegas. And yet, just four weeks into my new life, I find myself merrily tapping away at the keyboard in a printed silk two-piece with an elasticated waistband at 2.30 in the afternoon. I tell myself it’s not so bad because a) it’s Friday; b) it’s pretty much dark outside All THE TIME here in winter, so nightwear seems appropriate; and c) I’m doing phone interviews with people in the US and it’s morning there. But basically I am a disgrace. I vow that when the clock strikes 4.30pm I’ll shower, dress and maybe even brush my hair. Like a proper grown-up. Half past four has become the cut-off point for any kind of slovenliness that I wouldn’t want anyone else to see. This is because Lego Man has taken to arriving home around about this frankly ludicrous hour.
He’d caught me off guard to begin with. A couple of weeks before as I was tapping away at my laptop in my pyjamas, a rush of icy air surged through the front door as it swung open and there, barely distinguishable against the soul-destroying darkness, stood a figure.
‘Hello?’ I asked, alert lest an intruder was entering the house or the Mr Beards were back.
‘It’s me,’ Lego Man replied.
‘What are you doing here?’ Was he sick? Had he lost his job? Had Lego HQ been evacuated under missile attack? (My motto: Why think rationally when you can add a little drama?) ‘And shut that door! It’s bloody freezing!’
‘Thanks for the warm welcome,’ was Lego Man’s response, before dropping his man-bag and explaining that the office was virtually empty by 4pm. ‘Most people with kids had cleared their desks to go and pick them up from school or daycare by 3pm.’
‘Three?’
‘Uhuh.’
‘Everyone just leaves work really early? No one competes to be the last at their desk? Or gets takeout to pull an all-nighter?’
The Year of Living Danishly Page 5
