FRIDAYBOOKS}
play-inspired military base’. Interiors are also identical, with white walls and bleached wooden floors, a ‘wipe - clean design’ with ‘not an item of clutter in sight’.
Kitchen utensils are lined up with clinical precision. No one tidies up for visitors, as ‘Danes try to keep their homes nice all the time’ — R ussell was told this as a kind of implicit rebuke. Needless to say , ID cards are compulsory and have to be shown even if you are borrowing a library book , and everyone is recorded on a Central Population Register.
A barcode contains one’s entire medical history. The Danes are totalitarian about their recycling bins and anyone not placing their paper, cans, bottles and organic waste in the right receptacle risks arrest. Though sugar is virtually banned as unwhole - some, most people chain-smoke. Also, vegetarianism is ‘practi - cally unheard of’.
The Danes are unsentimental about animals. A perfectly healthy giraffe at the zoo was fed to the lions because ‘ his genes were too common ’. There is a big mink industry . Once the furs are stripped from the carcass, ‘the flesh is used to make biodiesel’.
Russell says ‘Danes don ’t believe that buying more stuff brings you happiness’ — but before we applaud their antimaterialism, it is worth noting that the sales tax on a car is 180 per cent, whether or not the fuel tank is filled with minced mink.
As a short cab ride around Jutland costs more than your average Ryanair flight, I wonder how they get about? Horse and sleigh?
As for their vaunted short office hours — this may be because ‘the more you earn, the more tax you pay’. So where’s the incentive? Anyone perceived to be spending long sessions at their desk is rather cruelly given leaflets on efficiency and time management. ‘Everyone in the office takes it in turns to bake and bring in rolls and pastries’, and there are bowls of Lego in the middle of tables ‘to encourage employees and guests to build as they talk’. Anyway, what do they do with their endless leisure? The Danish government has a long tradition of subsidising hobby societies, which is why there are so many of them: cycling clubs, gymnastics clubs, napkin-folding clubs. Could this mean that even the swinger clubs that proliferate in Denmark are subsidised too?
THEY are addicted not only to Midsomer Murders (‘the biggest- rated TV import’), but to X-rated channels. The legal age of consent is 15. Hotel rooms are provided for office parties, because everyone pairs off for sex.
It only dawns on Helen Russell quite late on that ‘all is not necessarily rosy in the Scandinavian idyll’.
Unfortunately, she possesses no satirical bite to make anything of this. Her prose is as flat as Denmark itself. It was pretty much obvious to me from page one, however , that here is a country where the big issue is that no one dares laugh at themselves — and laughing at ourselves is a chief British virtue.
Paradoxically, Russell made me very glad I am sticking it out under inky British skies. How lucky we are to be in a place filled with confusions and contradictions, with slippery cobbles and yellow fogs, spooky alleys and twisted staircases, where we watch silly Carry On films or giggle at Dame Joan Collins in pantomime.
Our slightly disorientated Britishness, where grumbling is a way of life, is better than Danish tranquillity any day.