The Almost Nearly Perfect People Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Michael Booth

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Introduction

  DENMARK

  Chapter 1: Happiness

  Chapter 2: Bacon

  Chapter 3: Gini

  Chapter 4: Boffers

  Chapter 5: Chicken

  Chapter 6: Vikings

  Chapter 7: 72 per cent

  Chapter 8: Hot-Tub Sandwiches

  Chapter 9: The Bumblebee

  Chapter 10: Denim Dungarees

  Chapter 11: Bettina’s Shoes

  Chapter 12: Dixieland

  Chapter 13: Pendulous Breasts

  Chapter 14: The Happiness Delusion

  ICELAND

  Chapter 1: Hakarl

  Chapter 2: Bankers

  Chapter 3: Denmark

  Chapter 4: Elves

  Chapter 5: Steam

  NORWAY

  Chapter 1: Dirndls

  Chapter 2: Egoiste

  Chapter 3: The New Quislings

  Chapter 4: Friluftsliv

  Chapter 5: Bananas

  Chapter 6: Dutch Disease

  Chapter 7: Butter

  FINLAND

  Chapter 1: Santa

  Chapter 2: Silence

  Chapter 3: Alcohol

  Chapter 4: Sweden

  Chapter 5: Russia

  Chapter 6: School

  Chapter 7: Wives

  SWEDEN

  Chapter 1: Crayfish

  Chapter 2: Donald Duck

  Chapter 3: Stockholm Syndrome

  Chapter 4: Integration

  Chapter 5: Catalonians

  Chapter 6: Somali Pizza

  Chapter 7: The Party

  Chapter 8: Guilt

  Chapter 9: Hairnets

  Chapter 10: Class

  Chapter 11: Ball Bearings

  Epilogue

  Index

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  The whole world wants to learn the secrets of Nordic exceptionalism: why are the Danes the happiest people in the world, despite having the highest taxes? If the Finns really have the best education system, how come they still think all Swedish men are gay? Are the Icelanders really feral? How are the Norwegians spending their fantastical oil wealth? And why do all of them hate the Swedes?

  Michael Booth has lived among the Scandinavians, on and off, for over ten years, perplexed by their many strange paradoxes and chracter traits and equally bemused by the unquestioning enthusiasm for all things Nordic that has engulfed the rest of the world, whether it be for their food, television, social systems or chunky knitwear.

  In this timely book he leaves his adopted home of Denmark and embarks on a journey through all five of the Nordic countries to discover who these curious tribes are, the secrets of their success and, most intriguing of all, what they think of each other. Along the way a more nuanced, often darker picture emerges of a region plagued by taboos, characterised by suffocating parochialism and populated by extremists of various shades.

  They may very well be almost nearly perfect, but it isn’t easy being Scandinavian.

  About the Author

  Michael Booth contributes to numerous British and foreign magazines and all of the UK’s broadsheet newspapers. He is the author of four works of non-fiction: Eat, Pray, Eat, which was nominated for a British Travel Press Award in 2012; Just As Well I’m Leaving, nominated for the Irish Times first writers award; Sacré Cordon Bleu, a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week; and Sushi and Beyond, winner of the Guild of Food Writers award in 2010. He lives in Denmark with his wife and children.

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Just As Well I’m Leaving

  Doing without Delia

  Sushi and Beyond

  Eat, Pray, Eat

  To Lissen, Asger and Emil

  The Almost Nearly Perfect People

  The Truth About the Nordic Miracle

  Michael Booth

  Introduction

  EARLY ONE DARK April morning a few years ago I was sitting in my living room in central Copenhagen, wrapped in a blanket and yearning for spring, when I opened that day’s newspaper to discover that my adopted countrymen had been anointed the happiest of their species in something called the Satisfaction with Life Index, compiled by the Department of Psychology at the University of Leicester.

  I checked the date on the newspaper: it wasn’t 1 April. Indeed a quick look online confirmed that this was headline news around the world. Everyone from the Daily Mail to Al Jazeera was covering the story as if it had been handed down on a stone tablet. Denmark was the happiest place in the world. The happiest? This dark, wet, dull, flat little country that I now called home, with its handful of stoic, sensible people and the highest taxes in the world? Britain was forty-first on the list. A man at a university had said it, so it must be true.

  ‘Well, they are doing an awfully good job of hiding it,’ I thought to myself as I looked out of the window at the rain-swept harbour. ‘They don’t seem all that frisky to me.’ Down below, cyclists swaddled in high-visibility Arctic gear crossed the Langebro together with umbrella-jostling pedestrians, both battling the spray from passing trucks and buses.

  I thought back to the previous day’s soul-sapping adventures in my recently adopted homeland. In the morning there had been my twice-weekly encounter with the sullen check-out girl at the local supermarket who, as was her habit, had rung up the cost of my prohibitively expensive, low-grade produce without acknowledging my existence. Outside, other pedestrians had tutted audibly when I’d crossed the street on a red light; there was no traffic, but in Denmark pre-empting the green man is a provocative breach of social etiquette. I had cycled home through the drizzle to find a tax bill relieving me of an alarming proportion of that month’s income, having along the way provoked the fury of a motorist who had threatened to kill me because I had infringed the no-left-turn rule (literally, he had rolled down his window and, in the manner and accent of a Bond villain, shouted, ‘I vill kill you’). The evening’s prime-time TV entertainment had consisted of a programme on how to tackle excessive chafing of cow udders, followed by a ten-year-old episode of Taggart, and then Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? – its titular, life-altering rhetoric somewhat undermined by the fact that a million kroner are worth only around £100,000, in Denmark just enough to buy you a meal out with change for the cinema.

  This, I should add, was long before all those critically acclaimed Danish TV series hit the screens and New Nordic cuisine revolutionised our kitchens, long before Sarah Lund charmed us with her knitwear and Birgitte Nyborg seduced us with her pencil skirts and no-nonsense attitude to right-wing politicians, and long before the recent, seemingly ceaseless wave of Danish mania gripped the world. Back then, I had come to think of the Danes as essentially decent, hard-working, law-abiding people, rarely prone to public expressions of . . . well, anything much, let alone happiness. The Danes were Lutheran by nature, if not by ritual observance: they shunned ostentation, distrusted exuberant expressions of emotion, and kept themselves to themselves. Compared to, say, the Thais or Puerto Ricans or even the British, they were a frosty, solemn bunch. I would go as far as to say that of the fifty or so nationalities that I had encountered in my travels up to that point, the Danes would probably have ranked in the bottom quarter as among the least demonstrably joyful people on earth, along with the Swedes, the Finns and the Norwegians.

  Perhaps it was all the antidepressants they were taking that was fogging their perception, I thought to myself. I had read a recent report which said that, in Europe, only the Icelanders consumed
more happy pills than the Danes, and the rate at which they were popping them was increasing. Was Danish happiness nothing more than oblivion sponsored by Prozac?

  In fact, as I began to delve deeper into the Danish happiness phenomenon I discovered that the University of Leicester report was not as ground-breaking as it might have liked to think. The Danes came top of the EU’s first ever well-being survey – the Eurobarometer – as long ago as 1973, and are still top today. In the latest one, more than two-thirds of the thousands of Danes who were polled claimed to be ‘very satisfied’ with their lives.

  In 2009 there was the papal-like visit to Copenhagen of Oprah Winfrey, who cited the fact that ‘people leave their children in buggies outside of cafés, that you aren’t worried they will get stolen . . . that everyone isn’t racing racing racing to get more more more’ as the Danes’s secret to success. If Oprah was anointing Denmark, it must be true.

  By the time Oprah descended from the heavens I had actually left Denmark, having finally driven my wife to the very end of her tether with my incessant moaning about her homeland: the punishing weather, the heinous taxes, the predictable monoculture, the stifling insistence on lowest-common-denominator consensus, the fear of anything or anyone different from the norm, the distrust of ambition and disapproval of success, the appalling public manners, and the remorseless diet of fatty pork, salty liquorice, cheap beer and marzipan. But I still kept a wary, slightly bewildered eye on the Danish happiness phenomenon.

  I shook my head in disbelief when, for example, the country topped the Gallup World Poll, which asked a thousand people over the age of fifteen in 155 countries to rate, on a scale of 1 to 10, both their lives now and how they expected them to pan out in the future. Gallup asked other questions about social support (‘If you were in trouble, do you have relatives or friends you can count on to help you whenever you need them?’); freedom (‘In your country, are you satisfied or dissatisfied with your freedom to choose what you do with your life?’); and corruption (‘Is corruption widespread within businesses located in your country?’). The answers revealed that 82 per cent of Danes were ‘thriving’ (the highest score), while only 1 per cent were ‘suffering’. Their average ‘daily experience’ scored a world-beating 7.9 out of 10. By way of comparison, in Togo, the lowest-ranked country, only 1 per cent were considered to be thriving.

  ‘Perhaps they should ask the Somali immigrants in Ishøj how happy they are,’ I would think to myself whenever I heard about these surveys and reports, although I seriously doubted any of the researchers ever ventured far outside of Copenhagen’s prosperous suburbs.

  Then came the final, crowning moment in the Danish happiness story: in 2012, the United Nations’s first ever World Happiness Report, compiled by economists John Helliwell, Richard Layard and Jeffrey Sachs, amalgamated the results of all the current ‘happiness’ research – the Gallup World Polls, World and European Values Surveys, European Social Survey, and so on. And, guess what? Belgium came first! No, I’m joking. Denmark was once again judged the happiest country in the world, with Finland (2), Norway (3) and Sweden (7) close behind.

  To paraphrase Lady Bracknell, to win one happiness survey may be regarded as good fortune, to win virtually every one since 1973 is convincing grounds for a definitive anthropological thesis.

  In fact, Denmark was not without rivals to the title of peachiest place to live. As the UN report suggested, each of the Nordic countries has its own particular claim to life-quality supremacy. Shortly after the UN report was published, Newsweek announced that it was Finland, and not Denmark, that has the best quality of life, while Norway topped the UN’s own Human Development Index, and another recent report claimed that Sweden is the best country to live in if you are a woman.

  So, Denmark doesn’t always come first in all the categories of these wellness, satisfaction and happiness surveys, but it is invariably thereabouts, and if it isn’t number one, then another Nordic country almost inevitably is. Occasionally New Zealand or Japan might elbow their way into the picture (or perhaps Singapore, or Switzerland) but, overall, the message from all of these reports, which were enthusiastically and unquestioningly reported in the European and US media, was as clear as a glass of ice-cold schnapps: the Scandinavians were not only the happiest and most contented people in the world, but also the most peaceful, tolerant, egalitarian, progressive, prosperous, modern, liberal, liberated, best-educated, most technologically advanced, and with the best pop music, coolest TV detectives and even, in the last few years, the best restaurant, to boot. Between them, these five countries – Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland – could boast the best education system in the world (Finland); a shining example of a properly secular, multicultural, modern industrial society (Sweden); colossal oil wealth, being invested in sensible, ethical, long-term things rather than silly tall buildings or Park Lane call girls (Norway); the most gender-equal society in the world, the longest-living men, and lots of haddock (Iceland); and ambitious environmental policies and generously funded welfare state systems (all of them).

  The consensus was overwhelming: if you wanted to know where to look for the definitive model of how to live a fulfilled, happy, well balanced, healthy and enlightened life, you should turn your gaze north of Germany, and just to the left of Russia.

  I did more than that. After some years of watching the Danish happiness bandwagon roll relentlessly on from a distance – interspersed with regular visits which, if anything, only served to confuse me more (weather still shitty? Check. Tax rate still over 50 per cent? Yep. Shops closed whenever you need them? Oh yes) – I moved back there.

  This wasn’t some magnanimous gesture of forgiveness, nor a bold experiment to test the boundaries of human endurance: my wife wanted to move back to her homeland and, despite every molecule of my being screaming, ‘Don’t you remember what it was actually like to live there, Michael?’ I have learned from harrowing experience over the years that it is usually best in the long run if I just do what she says.

  If anything, the fever for all things Nordic only intensified around the world after I returned to live there. The world, it seemed, could not get enough of contemporary Viking culture: Swedish crime authors Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson began to shift millions of books, and Danmarks Radio (DR), the Danish national broadcaster, sold three series of its miserablist crime epic, Forbrydelsen (The Killing), to 120 countries, and even saw it remade for American TV. The company’s follow-up, the political drama Borgen (‘The Castle’ – the nickname given to the Danish parliament building), won a BAFTA and a million viewers on BBC4; and even Broen (The Bridge), a Danish–Swedish crime series, was a hit. (No matter that there was little original about Forbrydelsen other than its setting – we had seen tough female cops many times before; no matter that Borgen was a third-rate West Wing, albeit with better lampshades; or that The Bridge was actually really, really rubbish.) Suddenly Danish architects, most notably Bjarke Ingels, were knocking out major international building projects as if they were made out of Lego blocks, and works by artists like Olafur Eliasson were appearing everywhere from Louis Vuitton window displays to the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. A former Danish prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, took over as the head of NATO and a former Finnish president, Martti Ahtisaari, won the Nobel Peace Prize. Danish films had a major moment, winning Oscars and awards at Cannes with directors such as Thomas Vinterberg, Lars von Trier, Susanne Bier and Nicolas Winding Refn becoming among the most acclaimed of the current era, and the actor Mads Mikkelsen (Casino Royale, The Hunt, Hannibal) became such a regular figure on Danish and international screens that these days he calls to mind John Updike’s famous couplet on a similarly ubiquitous French actor: ‘I think that I shall never view/A French film without Depardieu’. And, of course, there was the New Nordic food ‘revolution’ and the journey of the Copenhagen restaurant Noma from obscure joke to international trendsetter, named best restaurant in the world three times in a row and making its head chef, René
Redzepi, a Time magazine cover star.

  Elsewhere in the region, Finland gave us Angry Birds, won Eurovision with a band apparently made up of orcs (Lordi) and, for a while at least, mobile phones that took up permanent residence in everyone’s inside breast pocket. Meanwhile Sweden continued its domination of our high streets with H&M and Ikea, and of our airwaves with pop producers and singers too numerous to list here, as well as giving us Skype and Spotify; Norway kept the world supplied with oil and fish fingers; and the Icelanders embarked on their extraordinary fiscal buccaneering spree.

  No matter where I turned for my news, I could not escape the (Iceland aside) almost exclusively adulatory coverage of all things Scandinavian. If our newspapers, TV and radio were to be believed, the Nordic countries simply could not put a foot wrong. These were the promised lands of equality, easy living, quality of life and home baking. But I had seen a different side actually living up here in the cold, grey north and, though there were many aspects to Scandinavian living that were indeed exemplary, and from which the rest of the world could learn a great deal, I grew increasingly frustrated by the lack of nuance in the picture being painted of my adopted homeland.

  One thing in particular about this new-found love of all things Scandinavian – be it their free-form schools, whitewashed interior design, consensus-driven political systems or chunky jumpers – which struck me as particularly odd: considering all this positive PR, and with awareness of the so-called Nordic miracle at an all-time high, why wasn’t everyone flocking to live here? Why did people still dream of a house in Spain or France? Why weren’t they packing up their mules and heading for Aalborg or Trondheim? For all the crime literature and TV shows, why was our knowledge of Scandinavia still so abysmally lacking? How come you have no idea where Aalborg or Trondheim actually are (be honest)? Why can no one you know speak Swedish or ‘get by’ in Norwegian? Name the Danish foreign minister. Or Norway’s most popular comedian. Or a Finnish person. Any Finnish person.