The Year of Living Danishly

by Helen Russell

  Nobody calls me on my mobile to shout at me for not answering an urgent email. Nobody lets off a flare gun from London that can be seen all the way over in Jutland to alert me to the fact that my services are required. No bat-light goes on over the North Sea to summon my expertise. I have a startling realisation that I am not nearly as indispensable as I think I am. My natural reaction is to panic that my career must therefore be in tatters and assume that I’ll never work again. But then I try breathing. And not being a massive idiot. And this, it transpires, is a far more effective strategy.

  I have ‘an evening’, despite putting in two more hours of work than the average Dane. I walk the dog in the forest and feel as though I’m in The Killing, about to discover a shallow grave at any moment. I watch TV. I talk to my husband. Life goes on. And in the morning? Other than the glut of emails offering to enhance my manhood and a few PR memos, my inbox is empty. Lesson two of living Danishly, learned.

  * * *

  Things I’ve learned this month:

  Someone out there has my share of Lego bricks

  Jante’s Law can be strangely liberating

  If I’m going to be stressed anywhere, Denmark’s the place to be

  I am not important. If I take a break, no one dies. And this is A Good Thing.

  3. March

  Leisure & Languages

  Now that Lego Man and I have all this free time, we need to work out how to fill it. At home, this wouldn’t have been a problem. At home, we had a social life, as well as an extended circle of friends and family we kept meaning to see but didn’t have the time because we were always so busy. Now we have the time, just not the friends or family. We go back to the UK for a weekend and see lots of people all in one go. It feels a little like we’re celebrity guests making a cameo appearance – for one night only in a gastropub near you. But then we come back to Sticksville and realise that we have to start over again. Some friends from home make plans to visit. Some send care parcels of Cadbury’s Creme Eggs and British magazines. I am immensely grateful to them all. But we’ve got another nine months of living Danishly to go, and we can’t keep going home every other weekend to carry on a social life across the North Sea. If we want to make this work, we’re going to have to get out there, make some actual Danish friends and find things to do. This is somewhat scary.

  ‘So, what happens now?’ Lego Man asks. It’s a Thursday evening and he’s restless. I can tell he’s restless because he’s just emptied the dishwasher, unprompted, and is now moving his expensive Danish designer candlestick from one end of the dining room table to the other and back again to assess where it looks best.

  ‘What do you mean “what happens now”?’ I look up from a book, holding my finger at end of the sentence I’ve just read so that I don’t lose my place and hoping this interruption won’t last long.

  ‘Well, we’ve cleaned the house. We’ve walked the dog. We’ve watched The Bridge, and it’s only 7pm…’

  ‘So…?’

  ‘So, what do we do now?’

  ‘Oh, I see. Why don’t you read something?’ I nod vaguely in the direction of the bookcase.

  ‘Done that,’ he says, tapping his head as though every book we own is now safely memorised within his skull.

  ‘Right…’ I cast around for a bookmark. This could take a while.

  Since getting our heads around this strange new ‘work-life balance’ concept, Lego Man has been at a loss. He’s like one of those National Lottery winners facing a lifetime of leisure and luxury who doesn’t quite know what to do with it. As Danes work just 34 hours a week, we’re left with an alarming 134 hours to fill. I’m happy to boxset/read/eat the extra time away for a little while longer, but Lego Man is not. Nor does he feel it’s ‘healthy’ for me to be stuck inside all the time.

  ‘Well?’ Lego Man is waiting patiently. ‘What do you think they all do?’

  ‘They?’

  ‘The Danes. Of an evening, I mean?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say, getting up from the sofa and noticing that I have left a deep indentation. This suggests that I may have been there for some time. Damn it, maybe Lego Man is right… ‘We could ask around, I suppose?’ I say, reluctantly. I can tell that I’m about to be bullied into doing something other than lazing around reading books. ‘We could find out what normal people do, I suppose—’

  ‘—We are normal people!’

  ‘—other people,’ I correct myself swiftly, ‘I mean other people.’

  ‘Right. Yes. Good plan. Let’s both do that.’

  And so the very next day I begin to investigate how the good people of our newly adopted homeland fill their free time each week and whether the pursuit of leisure can have an impact on happiness levels. I look up the leading authority on leisure in my new hood – Danish sociologist Bjarne Ibsen – to get a bit of background on leisure in Denmark and why it’s such a big deal around these parts.

  ‘Danes, in common with all Scandinavians, love a club, an association, or a society of some description where they can pursue a hobby,’ says Bjarne. ‘It all started with gymnastics.’

  ‘Gymnastics?’ I hadn’t expected this.

  ‘Yes, we have a long tradition of gymnastics in Denmark. It was considered good for the health of society after the modernisation of the farming class in the second half of the 19th century—’

  I translate this into laywoman’s terms: ‘So farmers were encouraged to do backflips and roly-polies and things?’

  ‘I think they’re called forward rolls,’ Lego Man mutters as he rifles through the detritus on the desk to find his glasses.

  ‘Sorry, forward rolls. So, why gymnastics?’

  ‘Well,’ Bjarne goes on, ‘it’s a form of exercise you can do inside as well as out, and you don’t need any special equipment. It was more about calisthenics than competitive displays back then. “Sport for all” became a goal for Scandinavian societies post-war,’ he tells me. This sounds wonderfully worthy. Studies show that moderate exercise has been proven to lower the risk of depression and boost long-term mental health. So could getting active and getting out there also be contributing to the Danes’ happiness levels?

  Bjarne thinks so. ‘It’s definitely something that we recognise has a positive impact on people,’ he says. ‘It started with sports clubs but now there are groups for all sorts of things.’ The Danish government has a long tradition of supporting hobby societies, offering free premises and facilities as well as subsidies for under-25s who want to start an association or join one. The individual municipalities – the Danish equivalent of counties or states – will often provide facilities for free for those over 25 as well. There are approximately 80,000 associations in Denmark and around 90 per cent of Danes are members of societies, with the average Dane a member of 2.8 clubs. Bjarne tells me that they have a saying here: ‘When two Danes meet they form an association’. ‘We form associations for things we don’t even need an association for. And because there’s such a consensus culture and Danes don’t like conflict, if there’s the slightest disagreement, we’ll often split into smaller clubs.’

  ‘Like leisure splinter groups?’

  ‘Exactly.’ He tells me that in the town of Rønne in Bornholm, the small island off the coast of Zealand, they started up a roller-skating club but the organisers couldn’t agree on one of the rules for the club. ‘So they split,’ says Bjarne, ‘and now there are two roller-skating clubs in the town.’

  ‘And why are the Danes so keen on clubs?’ I ask.

  ‘It fits in with the Scandinavian countries’ ideas about unity, harmony and equality. The theory is that being a part of a club helps you to be an active person, involved in community life and with a sense of responsibility for the collective. This is important for developing a society of trust. There’s lots of research to show that being part of a club helps develop trust as it encourages us to live a connected, associational life – which is good for us and makes us happy.’ Clubs in Denmark also transcend any c
lass barriers – as happiness economist Christian had told me before I set off on my quest, everyone is considered equal in a Danish club or society, so you’ll find a CEO playing football with a cleaner.

  Hobbies have long been proven to boost levels of well-being, and research from the Australian Happiness Institute found that having a pastime outside of work also improves quality of life, productivity and likelihood of career success. So clever Danes combine individual passions and pursuits with a feeling of community by doing them as part of a club or association. And having a sense of belonging and a ready-made social circle just makes Danes even happier. I ask Bjarne whether he counts himself among Denmark’s happy hobbyists and he tells me that he does. His score? ‘Nine out of ten.’

  Determined to get myself a slice of the happy action, I start by trying to find out what my options are, hobby-wise, in Sticksville. The Mr Beards haven’t been seen since our altercation over the recycling bins but the woman who lives next door has taken to giving me a semi-friendly wave whenever we’re out at the same time. She looks alarmingly like Sarah Lund from The Killing but so far I’ve only seen her in a caterpillar-like duvet coat so I’m yet to discover whether she also favours a Faroese jumper. Last week, I tentatively tried a ‘Hej!’ (‘Hi’ in Danish) and felt disproportionately jubilant when she responded in kind. We then had a cursory conversation – in English – about where we were both from and what on earth we were doing in Sticksville and I discovered that Friendly Neighbour was originally from The Big City of Aarhus in Jutland, that she was single, aged 40 and fond of designer chairs (along with every Dane, it seems). Today, I take things further.

  ‘So, er, what do people do around here in their spare time?’ I start, sounding very much like I’m trying to pick her up. This is not my intention so I try another tack: ‘Are you a member of any, er, clubs?’ I ask casually.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she tells me. ‘I do t’ai chi, handball, hunting, then there’s the normal fitness classes like interval training and Zumba, of course.’ Of course. ‘And you? What do you do?’

  ‘Weeeeeeell,’ I make the word last as long as possible to buy some time before admitting, ‘we haven’t quite signed up for anything yet…’

  ‘Oh,’ she looks at me as though I’ve just told her that I don’t floss (I do, FYI). ‘So, what did you do in London?’

  ‘Erm…’ I scroll back through the past decade. The only extracurricular activity that I can remember fitting in between an exhausting work schedule and an excessive social calendar for the past twelve years is a life-drawing class Lego Man and I signed up for in 2009. It was part of a hopelessly optimistic New Year’s resolution to ‘better ourselves’ but the results were below poor. The whole affair culminated in a Tony Hart-style gallery presentation where I made one of the older models cry because my portrait of her looked uncannily like Noel Edmonds. (Me: ‘Honestly, I don’t know how it happened, I couldn’t even draw Noel Edmonds if I tried! Look.’ I tried. And failed. Surprisingly, this didn’t help.) Lego Man developed a signature style of heavily etched pubic areas but wasn’t so hot on faces or hands, which always ended up looking like garden trowels. We stopped attending after week five.

  ‘Well,’ I tell my neighbour, ‘we both just worked a lot in London. I mean, a lot.’

  ‘Right. So have you signed up for Danish language classes yet?’

  Damn! I knew there was something I should have been doing rather than curling up with Ian McEwan every night.

  We’ve had our official documentation through for weeks now and I still haven’t enrolled for evening classes, kindly funded by the government for all immigrants for up to three years. (‘But I’m sure it won’t take us that long!’ Lego Man and I laugh when we’re sent the automatic application form. Fools.)

  ‘It’s on my to-do list. In fact, I’m phoning them this afternoon!’ I shuffle off to inform Lego Man that we have our first leisure-time assignment. A University of Edinburgh study suggests that learning a second language has a positive effect on the brain and though there’s no direct proof that it’ll make us happier, it feels like something we should be doing to try to integrate and understand more of the secrets to living Danishly. So I sign us up, determined to give it a go.

  The local municipal language centre runs evening courses twice a week, so on a cold, dark (surprise!) Tuesday, we bowl up for lesson one. It doesn’t begin brilliantly.

  ‘Hvor hedder du?’ A skinny woman with too-long hair barks at us.

  ‘Oh, hi! Sorry, we’re here for the beginners’ Danish class?’

  ‘Hvor hedder du?!’ She’s insistent now.

  ‘Sorry, we haven’t started learning Danish yet, I just wanted to check – are we in the right room?’

  ‘HVOR HEDDER DU?!’ the strange woman is now screaming at us.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I bleat feebly, ‘I don’t know what that means … is it … Danish?’ Well done, genius.

  The strange skinny woman now begins to shout some other phrases (‘HVOR KOMMER DU FRA? HVOR ARBEJDER DU? HVOR GAMMEL DU? ER DU GIFT? HAR DU BØRN?’). As a cool panic trickles down my collar, I’m transported back to tellings-off in the headmistress’s office circa 1994.

  Finally, a Ukrainian woman takes pity on us and explains that the teacher is asking our name, where we come from, where we work, how old we are, whether we are married and whether we’ve got any children.

  A large part of me wants to shout back at the teacher, ‘it’s none of your bloody business!’ but instead I try being reasonable: ‘As I said, we haven’t had any lessons yet, so I’m afraid we don’t know what this means and how to answer in Danish…’

  But Mrs Bad Teacher ignores me and instead turns around and begins writing choice phrases up on a white board in shouty red capitals.

  ‘I think she’s screening us,’ whispers the Ukrainian.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I think she’s looking at our natural ability. To work out what level class we should all take.’ The Ukrainian is clearly picking up a lot more of this that we are.

  We end up in a class with a few Polish men, the kind Ukrainian woman, and half a dozen Filipino girls. Kind Ukrainian works in a ‘fiskefabrik’ – something that sounds far more glamorous than it actually is (a fish-processing factory). The Poles all work as cleaners and handymen in hotels and the Filipinos work as au pairs. I can’t help feeling surprised by this.

  ‘Isn’t everyone supposed to be equal in Denmark? Aren’t Danes supposed to do their own cleaning and child rearing?’ I mutter to Lego Man during break time.

  ‘I thought so too,’ he admits. But it turns out that the lure of Denmark’s quality of life has as much appeal for our Polish and Ukrainian classmates as it had for us. Enough, in fact, to outweigh the upheaval of relocation, career changes and being far from friends and family. One of the Filipino girls tells us that she and her friends earn more in Denmark as au pairs than they did at home as a nurse, a physiotherapist and a psychiatrist respectively. It’s interesting to be in a group with people we might never normally have met or spent time with and I find that being an immigrant is a humbling experience. I’m ashamed of the fact that my classmates all speak perfect English on top of their mother tongue and a smattering of other languages, when all we can do is ask where the nearest train station is in French. It turns out that attempting to learn a new language as a mid-thirties monoglot is no mean feat – and subtlety is everything.

  When the teacher asks us whether we’ve been practising our Danish in our spare time, I tell her I’ve been watching The Killing in preparation for class. She looks confused.

  ‘Have I pronounced it wrong? The “Killing”?’ I try again, more slowly

  ‘You watch killing?’ She sounds baffled so I try another pronunciation.

  English speakers’ guide to learning languages, lesson #3: If in doubt, try saying the same thing again in a different accent (lesson #1 being ‘say it louder’ and lesson #2 being ‘say it more slowly’).

  ‘Koolling?’ I try again.
She looks doubtful. I try one more time: ‘Kelling!’

  The teacher’s eyebrows shoot up like pointy hats and hover somewhere around her hairline. ‘Or maybe not…’ I mutter, as Lego Man gets busy on Google Translate. Kind Ukrainian is also leafing through her Danish dictionary and intervenes.

  ‘I think you have that wrong, look,’ she points, helpfully, to the appropriate entries in her dictionary and then reads out loud: ‘“Killing” means “kitten”. “Kylling”, pronounced “kooling” means “chicken” and “kælling”, pronounced “kelling” means …’ she tails off.

  ‘Yes?’ I strain to read the tiny print over her shoulder but am beaten to it by the Polish man sitting next to her.

  ‘It means “bitch”!’ he reads out with relish as I feel my cheeks redden.

  Excellent. Week one of language school and I’ve already called my teacher a bitch. I stay remarkably quiet for the remainder of the class but pick up some other surprising vocabulary, including the fact that ‘slut’ means ‘ends’ or ‘finished’. So my new washing machine hasn’t been abusing me all this time when it stopped and flashed the word ‘slut’ at me in bright red lights!

  Language can tell you a lot about a country, and we learn that there is an extensive vocabulary to describe Denmark’s variable weather but no word for ‘please’. I’ve just about got over the hilarity of ‘fart kontrol’ (‘speed limit’) and ‘slut spurt’ (‘closing down sale’), when we’re taught, helpfully, that the Danish for nipple is ‘brystvorte’, which translates as ‘breast wart’ and that ‘gift’ means ‘married’, as well as ‘poison’.

  ‘Coincidence?’ remarks another of the Poles, who’s currently going through a tricky divorce. ‘I think not.’

  I’m concerned about how I’m ever going to get my head around the language – the ninth most difficult in the world according to the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation. In the hope of some reassurance, I seek out Søs Nissen, deputy head of Jutland’s Kolding language centre. With Scandi-issue square glasses, a sparkling silver batwing jumper and a glossy bob, she looks like a rather glamorous owl. I try to explain my predicament and resist the urge to share my bird of prey observations.