There ain't nothing like a Dane

They’re boozers, brawlers and feed giraffes to lions. So why ARE they the world’s happiest people?

BOOK OF THE WEEK THE YEAR OF LIVING DANISHLY: UNCOVERING THE SECRETS OF THE WORLD’S HAPPIEST COUNTRY by Helen Russell (Icon Books £12.99) ROGER LEWIS

What do we know about Denmark, other than that it is the home of pastries, bacon, Carlsberg, Lurpak and Lego, which has to date exported 560 billion pieces of coloured plastic around the planet — a statistic coming as no surprise to any parent who has stepped barefoot on the blinking stuff in the middle of the night?

The population of 5.5 million means there are fewer people living in the whole country than are squeezed into South London.

Because the sun generally sets at three in the afternoon, everyone sits around gazing at candles (‘Danes burn a higher number of candles per head than anywhere else in the world’), feeling very smug that, despite their ‘cripplingly high taxes’, they have a comprehensive welfare system, a free health service, free education including university tuition, subsidised nursery schools and ‘unemployment insurance guaranteeing 80 per cent of your wages for two years’.

helen Russell is a fashion journalist so diligent she didn’t touch tuna for two weeks prior to interviewing Stella McCartney, who disapproves of over-fishing tuna stocks.

She had become thoroughly fed up with her life in London, where she felt her mind was ‘scattered and fragmented’ and her body was prone to headaches, insomnia and persistent tonsillitis, and couldn’t wait to move abroad and join Denmark’s ‘tolerant, equal, happy society’.

You’d think she was a goodwill ambassador for the Scandinavian tourist industry, the way she goes on. ‘The place was clean and the scenery was soul-lifting,’ Russell says. There is plenty of ‘ family leave, leisure and a decent work-life balance’. On average, the Danes work just 18.5 days a month — and everyone knocks off at three to pick up the kids. And there is 14 weeks’ mandatory paternity leave.

I’m sorry to say this, but the more Russell harped on about Danish ideals of ‘unity, harmony and equality’, the more I decided Denmark sounded a hell-hole with an impersonally efficient populace spewing politicallycorrect inanities.

The chief problem with a society where everyone is expected to be happy and content is that, if you don’t get all you hoped for, ‘people can get depressed, or at least think they are depressed’. Danes are the biggest boozers in Europe, next to Ireland, consuming ‘11 litres of pure alcohol per person per year’. I wonder what the cirrhosis figures look like?

We do know about domestic violence: 52 per cent of Danish women have been attacked and fights are frequent. ‘ We are Vikings!’ Russell was told, as if by way of proud self-exculpation.

Divorce isn’t only common (42.7 per cent), but a likelihood. ‘It’s because we have equality and freedom,’ a neighbour told Russell, who by this time was living in the town of Billund in Jutland, three hours from Copenhagen. ‘ If you are not happy, make a change.’

If that was me, I’d have to get re- married ten times a day. But then I don’t consider happiness a right.

The Danes find spontaneity anathema, also originality. They all live in streets of ‘identikit bungalows, like some sort of