The Almost Nearly Perfect People Read online

  ‘I wondered what was going on. Had there been a member of the royal family on the plane and I had missed them?’ he said. He thinks that the Danes are such ardent flag-wavers because, as a small country with Sweden and Germany for neighbours, they have a much greater need to express their national identity and, if anything, they are growing even more attached to the Dannebrog. ‘It has steadily become ever more visible as a marketing device and decoration,’ he writes, noting that, despite this, the Danes were surprisingly blasé about seeing it being burned in the streets of Damascus during the Mohammed cartoon crisis of 2005, perhaps because they weren’t real Dannebrogs and it wasn’t Danes who were doing the burning.

  Jenkins also recalls seeing a display of bananas in a supermarket bedecked with Danish flags. The flags were simply to draw the attention of shoppers to a special offer, ‘But I was a bit perplexed. I thought to myself, “They don’t grow bananas in Denmark.”’

  * * *

  1 Or, if you are German, gemütlichkeit, or Dutch gezelligheid.

  2 Oh, the number of festive occasions where I have sat patiently awaiting dessert as midnight strikes and yet another aged aunt hands round the photocopied lyrics to a popular song, which she has rewritten to incorporate humourous references from the celebrant’s life.

  3 This is not strictly true; there was one – from me. At the conclusion of his specially arranged 1980s medley, one of the choirmasters had included two lines of rap from Grandmaster Flash’s 1982 hit ‘The Message’, to be spoken in a ‘forceful’ style by the basses and tenors. I pointed out that in the line ‘Don’t push me ’cos I’m close to the edge’, you pronounced it ‘the edge’, not ‘thee edge’, or, at least, that’s how Mr Flash had rapped it. But a 65-year-old ex-English teacher in the bass section was having none of it and rallied the rest of the section behind him. The correct pronunciation was ‘thee edge’ he said, crossing his arms and shaking his head in disgust. I persisted, pointing out that my version was both more authentic and had a more percussive impact. The choirmaster agreed, but the elderly ex-teacher and his bass cronies stubbornly sang his version throughout the rehearsals and in the final concert, amid a mutual crossfire of glares.

  Chapter 13

  Pendulous breasts

  AFTER TAKING IN the Jelling stones, I continued my exploration of the Rotten Banana, driving west across Jutland through forests of Christmas trees, past fields filled with purple lupins, grazing cows (the pigs remaining hidden away in prisoner-of-war-type sheds) and gigantic wind turbines. I passed through small towns with the same chain stores, the same kebab shop, about ten banks and always a charity shop or two – the Rotten Banana is awash with charity shops. There would be a bakery selling the same rye bread and pastries (the Danes don’t call them ‘Danish pastries’, by the way, they are weinerbrød, or Vienna bread, after the city in which the style of baking was invented), and each town would, without fail, have a piece of civic art, usually, for some reason, a sculpture of a fat woman, or small fat figures climbing on a boulder.

  You find this kind of body-dysmorphic sculpture all over Denmark; there are even entire galleries full of such folkelig–hyggelig ‘art’ in Copenhagen. The most strikingly unattractive example of what I came to think of as the ‘Comedy Fatty’ school of art is in Ringkøbing, which I passed through on my drive up the west coast: here, on the harbourfront of this otherwise very pretty fishing village, stands a statue of a fat, naked Western woman with pendulous breasts, sitting on the shoulders of an emaciated African with cartoonish big lips and a loin cloth. She holds scales of justice but, just in case you don’t get the message, a small plaque informs you that the piece is called Survival of the Fattest, and that ‘it has been exhibited at several international NGO meetings’. Ah, NGO art. Ironically, Survival of the Fattest stands literally within sight of several outdoor harbourfront restaurants whose menus consist mostly of stuff that’s been dropped in vats of hot oil.

  Through more forests and fields and past more windmills I drove on endless straight roads. Just outside of a small town called Brande, at the very moment when the monotony of Jutland was really beginning to get to me, I passed on my left, in the midst of the trees, a cathedral-sized Hindu temple replete with multicoloured, god-encrusted ziggurat. I screeched to a halt, reversed, and jumped out, standing for a good couple of minutes taking in this extraordinary mirage.

  This, it turned out, was the Sree Abirami Amman temple, the spiritual focal point for the several thousand Tamil refugees who came to Denmark from Sri Lanka in the 1970s. I walked inside the entrance hall. The smell of sandalwood and jasmine was intense, transporting me back to India. As I peered in through the inner glass doors into the temple proper, a young woman wearing a thick winter coat over a green and gold sari approached me, smiling.

  She explained that the temple was overseen by a priestess, Sri Abirami Upasaki, or ‘Amma’, who performed daily rituals at 1 p.m. and 7 p.m. As it was nearly 7 p.m., she invited me to stay and watch.

  Soon after, a petite woman, swaddled from head to toes in orange robes, emerged from an old thatched cottage in the shadow of the temple and shuffled towards us. This was Amma. She glanced at me and then carried on inside, followed by a small middle-aged man, who smiled and nodded.

  ‘Have you eaten any meat today?’ he asked.

  I had, I said. ‘A really great hand-cut steak tartare in a bistro in . . .’ I began to enthuse about the meal. He held up his hand: ‘Then you may not enter the temple.’

  This was a vegetarians-only performance, so I watched through the glass doors of the temple as Amma waddled around in a cloud of incense, ringing bells, performing blessings and saying prayers, all the while being filmed by the younger woman for their daily online streaming service.

  Apparently, Amma has cured all manner of maladies, from infertility to cancer. She diagnoses ailments by rolling a lime over the patient, then slicing the fruit in half, curing whatever she finds by anointing them with holy water.

  ‘Does it really work?’ I asked the young woman.

  ‘Sometimes it works. She has made miracles. I have seen people come here mad, they were not in our world, and leave normal and healthy, now married with kids.’

  Even more remarkably, every 31 December, during a ceremony held at midnight, blood pours from Amma’s mouth, her face turns blue or black, and marks appear on the palms of her hands. After that evening’s – less eventful – ceremony, I talked a little with Amma, a shy woman who spoke heavily accented Danish in a virtual whisper.

  She came to Denmark, from Jaffna in 1974, when she was nine, she told me. I asked her about her first impressions.

  ‘I loved it,’ she said. ‘It was so peaceful, the people were so sweet.’

  She received her energy from God and transmitted it through her hands, she explained. She also gave advice to pilgrims, many of them Danes. I wondered if Amma had heard the theories about why the Danes were so happy.

  ‘Yes, they are happy. They are not so busy. A little less stressed. Lovely,’ she said.

  And with that, she bowed slightly and shuffled off to her little thatched cottage.

  From the temple I drove across to Jutland’s west coast which, with its vast sandy beaches, tempestuous surf and sprawling favelas of summer houses, draws tens of thousands of Danish and German holidaymakers every summer to places like Blåvand and Søndervig, with their old-fashioned seaside vibe, shops selling inflatable boats and fishing nets, soft ices, and so on. I felt a twinge of nostalgia for the British resorts of my childhood. All along the coast, thatched holiday homes nestled in the bosom of grassy dunes, like Hobbit houses sheltering from the ceaseless gales.

  I followed the coast road north until, without warning from my GPS, it ended abruptly at the Nissum estuary. Getting out of my car to stretch my legs, an immense gust of fishy stink hit me from the huge seafood-processing plant a few hundred metres away. I chatted with a man who was also waiting for the small roll-on, roll-off open-air ferry, which we could now see slo
wly chugging towards us from the other side of the inlet, like a floating garden trug. I told him I was on a tour of udkantsdanmark. ‘Ha!’ he laughed, gesturing around us. ‘This is extreme udkants!’

  Nevertheless, it had also drawn two German tourists: a couple, who waited behind me in the queue in their van. The man told me that they were on a pilgrimage, visiting locations from the ‘Olsen Band’ films. The Olsen Band (or Olsen Gang) are great Danish folkelig icons, three ill-starred, fictional petty criminals who featured in a string of highly successful domestic comedies in the seventies and eighties. The films were remade with both Swedish and Norwegian casts, making them a bona fide pan-Scandinavian cultural phenomenon. I haven’t seen those versions, but the original Danish films have a certain period charm, with a similar 1970s mainstream humour to the Carry On films, and with a Norman Wisdom ‘little man’ subtext. Some have gone so far as to interpret the gang’s, usually unsuccessful, dealings with big business and the establishment as sociopolitical commentary and, accordingly, they were quite successful in East Germany, hence, I suppose, the pilgrims.

  I stayed the night in Thisted, a proud, well-kept town beside the Limfjord, and then pottered back west, taking in what was, according to the national broadsheet Jyllands-Posten, Denmark’s most boring town: Hørdum. Hørdum has become something of an emblem for the ‘udkantisisation’ of Denmark, having seen its train station and dairy close, its school shut down, and the last of its sixty shops disappear. It was quite the most dreary place; a charmless street of single-storey houses with corrugated roofs. Towns like Hørdum are the reason Danish researchers have warned that by 2050 only 10 per cent of the population will remain in the countryside. Currently around a quarter of the population remains, but the flow continues inexorably towards the cities – 75 per cent of new jobs in Denmark are created in Copenhagen, and the capital is responsible for around half of the country’s GDP. Within the next couple of decades places like Hørdum will likely be ghost towns.

  Returning south, I took a detour to Billund to complete my trilogy of Jutland’s top spiritual sights after the Jelling stones and the Hindu temple, this time stopping off at Denmark’s great secular place of worship, Legoland.

  Here is a tip which could save you many times the cover price of this book: after five o’clock, admission to Legoland is free! Okay, the downside is that the rides are closed, but I couldn’t get enough of the sprawling Lego citiscapes, with their desolate streets and eerily trundling cars. Towering over Copenhagen, I had an overwhelming urge to run amok like Godzilla.

  It is an eccentric mix of subjects that the Lego builders have chosen to immortalise in injection-moulded acrylonitrile butadiene styrene bricks, ranging, seemingly at random, from Hollywood’s Chinese Theatre to the Göta Canal. I particularly enjoyed the ever-so-subtle digs at the Danes’ Nordic neighbours – the model of an exasperated, bearded Swede who stands, pulling his hair out in a rage, beside his broken-down Volvo, and the flashy Ferraris of nouveau-riche Norwegians on the streets of oil-rich Bergen.

  If you visit Legoland hoping for a wholesome, non-commercial, Lutheran take on a theme park you will be disappointed. The first thing you see as you enter is a large bank, and from that point on it is all about being parted from your money via the myriad temptations of low-grade hot dogs, virus-coloured slush ice, greasy burgers and, of course, Lego kits. The world’s largest Lego store is here. Pride of place goes to the company’s new ‘girly’ range, called ‘Friends’. Judging by the pictures on the boxes, Friends is hardly a shining beacon of Nordic gender equality: the figures seem mostly preoccupied with reclining in jacuzzis, making cupcakes and getting their hair done.

  I was in search of a true Lego icon. If I am honest, the real goal of my Jutland odyssey was to buy my very own Lego Death Star. I had hoped that, here in the bosom of the Lego corporation, it might be a little cheaper than in Lego’s flagship store on Strøget in Copenhagen. Surely Legoland would offer a discount for the faithful who had made the pilgrimage through the Jutlandish hinterlands.

  Finally, I found it. That receptacle of cherished memories and childhood dreams. On its front was a picture of the famous and magnificent orb of evil rendered with uncanny perfection in knobbly plastic bricks. Gingerly, breathlessly, I turned the box over in my hands trying to find the price, transported back thirty years by the familiar tinkling sounds as hundreds of pieces shifted around inside. A tear welled.

  And then I found it: four hundred quid! For a box of coloured plastic! Do me a fucking favour . . .

  Chapter 14

  The happiness delusion

  ‘We Danes are a hard pressed folk. No one pays as much tax as we do. No one works so much, no one has more physical illnesses as us, no one has more expensive cars, no one has more impossible children or worse schools.’

  Rasmus Bech, writing in Politiken, April 2012

  HR BECH MIGHT do well to check the figures for the Danes’ working hours (and he neglects to mention the awful weather), but, that aside, he does a fine job of highlighting key elements of the Danish happiness paradox. On the face of it, the Danes have considerably less to be happy about than most of us, yet, when asked, they still insist that they are the happiest of us all.

  What is one to make of this? Are the Danes really as happy as they claim? Or is this land of 12 million pigs telling porkies?

  The obvious answer to this is ‘Define happiness.’ If we are talking sombrero-wearing, heel-kicking, cocktail-umbrella joie de vivre, then the Danes do not score highly, and I suspect not even they would take their claims that far. But if we are talking about being contented with one’s lot, or (self-)satisfied, then the Danes do have a more convincing case to present.

  Over the years I have asked many Danes about these happiness surveys – whether they really believe that they are the global happiness champions – and I have yet to meet a single one of them who seriously believes it’s true. They appreciate the safety net of their welfare state, the way most things function well in their country, and all the free time they have, and they are proud of the recent international success of all the TV shows they have exported, but they tend to approach the subject of their much-vaunted happiness like the victims of a practical joke waiting to discover who the perpetrator is.

  On the other hand, these same Danes are often just as quick to counter any criticism of their country – of their schools, hospitals, transport, weather, taxes, politicians, taste in music, uneventful landscape, and so on – with the simple and, in a sense, argument-proof riposte: ‘Well, if that’s true, how come we are the happiest people in the world?’ (this usually accompanied by upturned palms and a tight, smug smile). So I guess the happiness argument does come in useful sometimes.

  I’ve mentioned my suspicion that this phenomenon has become a self-fulfilling prophecy for Danes: aware that they have a reputation to maintain in these international questionnaires, they pretend to be happier than they actually are. Anne Knudsen had another theory relating to why the Danes continue to respond positively to happiness surveys: ‘In Denmark it is shameful to be unhappy,’ she told me. ‘If you ask me how I am and I start telling you how bad I feel then it might force you to do something about it. It might put a burden on you to help me. So, that’s one of the main reasons people say things are all right, or even “super”.’

  Here’s another convincing theory, posited by a Danish friend of mine: ‘We always come top of those surveys because they ask us at the beginning of the year what our expectations are,’ he said. ‘Then they ask us at the end of the year whether those expectations were met. And because our expectations are so extremely low at the beginning of the year, they tend to get met more easily.’

  Could that be the secret of the Danes’ contentedness? Low expectations? It is true that, when asked how they expect the next year to pan out, the Danes do typically expect less than the rest of us, and when their low expectations are fulfilled, so are they. Happiness has never been an ‘inalienable right’ in Denmark, so it co
uld be that the Danes appreciate it all the more when it manifests itself – their turbulent history of loss has made them grateful for any crumbs of joy that come their way. Perhaps Danish happiness is not really happiness at all, but something much more valuable and durable: contentedness, being satisfied with your lot, low-level needs being met, higher expectations being kept in check.

  What do the Danes say makes them happy? A recent survey by a Danish newspaper brought these insights: 74 per cent cited being together with friends as their greatest source of happiness; family came second with 70 per cent; foreign travel was a perhaps unsurprising third choice; with sport taking precedence over eating or watching TV (yeah, right). Then again, another survey revealed that a remarkable 54 per cent of Danes do not fear death – perhaps that’s their secret?

  A few years ago, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Southern Denmark, Kaare Christensen, published a slightly tongue-in-cheek overview of what he saw as the possible reasons for the Danes’ happiness, entitled ‘Why Danes Are Smug: A Comparative Study of Life Satisfaction in the European Union’. His explanations ranged from the fact that the Danes might have been drunk when responding to questionnaires to their surprise 1992 European Championship victory (not only did they beat Germany in the final, but it took place in Sweden: a joyous confluence of multiple revenge fantasies). But Christensen and his team also concluded that low expectations were key: ‘If expectations are unrealistically high they could also be the basis of disappointment and low life satisfaction,’ writes Christensen. ‘Year after year they are pleasantly surprised to find that not everything is getting more rotten in the state of Denmark.’