The Year of Living Danishly Read online

  The Year of Living

  DANISHLY

  The Year of Living

  DANISHLY

  uncovering the secrets

  of the world’s

  happiest country

  Helen Russell

  Published in the UK in 2015 by

  Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

  39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

  email: [email protected]

  www.iconbooks.com

  Sold in the UK, Europe and Asia

  by Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House,

  74–77 Great Russell Street,

  London WC1B 3DA or their agents

  Distributed in the UK, Europe and Asia

  by TBS Ltd, TBS Distribution Centre, Colchester Road,

  Frating Green, Colchester CO7 7DW

  Distributed in Australia and New Zealand

  by Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd,

  PO Box 8500, 83 Alexander Street,

  Crows Nest, NSW 2065

  Distributed in South Africa by

  Jonathan Ball, Office B4, The District,

  41 Sir Lowry Road, Woodstock 7925

  Distributed in India by Penguin Books India,

  7th Floor, Infinity Tower – C, DLF Cyber City,

  Gurgaon 122002, Haryana

  ISBN: 978-184831-812-0

  Text copyright © 2015 Helen Russell

  The author has asserted her moral rights.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  Typeset in Filosofia by Marie Doherty

  Printed and bound in the UK

  by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

  For Little Red, Lego Man and the woman in the salopettes-’n’-beret combo.

  Contents

  Prologue: Making Changes – The Happiness Project

  1. January – Hygge & Home

  2. February – Forgetting the 9–5

  3. March – Leisure & Languages

  4. April – Great Danes & Other Animals

  5. May – Traditions & Getting Told Off

  6. June – Just a Girl

  7. July – Going Away & Playing Away

  8. August – The Kids are Alright

  9. September – Butchers, Bakers & Culture Makers

  10. October – In Sickness & in Health

  11. November – ‘Here comes the Snow/Sleet/Soul-destroying Darkness…’

  12. December – Trusting the Taxman (or Woman)

  13. Christmas – God Jul!

  Epilogue: Made in Denmark

  Top ten tips for living Danishly

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Making Changes – The Happiness Project

  It all started simply enough. After a few days off work my husband and I were suffering from post-holiday blues and struggling to get back into the swing of things. A grey drizzle had descended on London and the city looked grubby and felt somehow worn out – as did I. ‘There has to be more to life than this…’ was the taunt that ran through my head as I took the tube to the office every day, then navigated my way home through chicken bone-strewn streets twelve hours later, before putting in a couple of hours of extra work or going to events for my job. As a journalist on a glossy magazine, I felt like a fraud. I spent my days writing about how readers could ‘have it all’: a healthy work-life balance, success, sanity, sobriety – all while sporting the latest styles and a radiant glow. In reality, I was still paying off student loans, relying on industrial quantities of caffeine to get through the day and self-medicating with Sauvignon Blanc to get myself to sleep.

  Sunday evenings had become characterised by a familiar tightening in my chest at the prospect of the week ahead, and it was getting harder and harder to keep from hitting the snooze button several times each morning. I had a job I’d worked hard for in an industry I’d been toiling in for more than a decade. But once I got the role I’d been striving towards, I realised I wasn’t actually any happier – just busier. What I aspired to had become a moving target. Even when I reached it, there’d be something else I thought was ‘missing’. The list of things I thought I wanted, or needed, or should be doing, was inexhaustible. I, on the other hand, was permanently exhausted. Life felt scattered and fragmented. I was always trying to do too many things at once and always felt as though I was falling behind.

  I was 33 – the same age Jesus got to, only by this point he’d supposedly walked on water, cured lepers and resurrected the dead. At the very least he’d inspired a few followers, cursed a fig tree, and done something pretty whizzy with wine at a wedding. But me? I had a job. And a flat. And a husband and nice friends. And a new dog – a mutt of indeterminate breeding that we’d hoped might bring a bucolic balance to our hectic urban lives. So life was OK. Well, apart from the headaches, the intermittent insomnia, the on/off tonsillitis that hadn’t shifted despite months of antibiotics and the colds I seemed to come down with every other week. But that was normal, right?

  I’d thrived on the adrenaline of city life in the past, and the bright, buzzy team I worked with meant that there was never a dull moment. I had a full social calendar and a support network of friends I loved dearly, and I lived in one of the most exciting places in the world. But after twelve years at full pelt in the country’s capital and the second stabbing in my North London neighbourhood in as many months, I suddenly felt broken.

  There was something else, too. For two years, I had been poked, prodded and injected with hormones daily only to have my heart broken each month. We’d been trying for a baby, but it just wasn’t working. Now, my stomach churned every time a card and a collection went round the office for some colleague or other off on maternity leave. There are only so many Baby Gap romper suits you can coo over when it’s all you’ve wanted for years – all your thrice-weekly hospital appointments have been aiming for. People had started to joke that I should ‘hurry up’, that I wasn’t ‘that young any more’ and didn’t want to ‘miss the boat’. I would smile so hard that my jaw would ache, while trying to resist the urge to punch them in the face and shout: ‘Bugger off!’ I’d resigned myself to a future of IVF appointments fitted in around work, then working even more in what spare time I had to keep up. I had to keep going, to stop myself from thinking too much and to maintain the lifestyle I thought I wanted. That I thought we needed. My other half was also feeling the strain and would come home furious with the world most nights. He’d rant about bad drivers or the rush-hour traffic he’d endured on his 90-minute commute to and from work, before collapsing on the sofa and falling into a Top Gear/trash TV coma until bed.

  My husband is a serious-looking blond chap with a hint of the physics teacher about him who once auditioned to be the Milky Bar kid. He didn’t have a TV growing up so wasn’t entirely sure what a Milky Bar was, but his parents had seen an ad in the Guardian and thought it sounded wholesome. Another albino-esque child got the part in the end, but he remembers the day fondly as the first time he got to play with a handheld Nintendo that another hopeful had brought along. He also got to eat as much chocolate as he liked – something else not normally allowed. His parents eschewed many such new-fangled gadgets and foodstuffs, bestowing on him instead a childhood of classical music, museum visits and long, bracing walks. I can only begin to imagine their disappointment when, aged eight, he announced that his favourite book was the Argos catalogue; a weighty tome that he would sit with happily for hours on end, circling various consumer electronics and Lego sets he wanted. This should have been an early indicator of what was in store.

  He came along at a time in my life when I had just about given up hope. 2008, to be exact. My previous boyfriend had
dumped me at a wedding (really), and the last date I’d been on was with a man who’d invited me round for dinner before getting caught up watching football on TV and so forgetting to buy any food. He said he’d order me a Dominos pizza instead. I told him not to bother. So when I met my husband-to-be and he offered to cook, I wasn’t expecting much. But supper went surprisingly well. He was clever and funny and kind and there were ramekins involved. My mother, when I informed her of this last fact, was very impressed. ‘That’s the sign of a very well brought up young man,’ she told me, ‘to own a set of ramekins. Let alone to know what to do with them!’

  I married him three years later. Mostly because he made me laugh, ate my experimental cooking and didn’t complain when I mineswept the house for sweets. He could also be incredibly irritating – losing keys, wallet, phone or all of the above on a daily basis, and having an apparent inability to arrive anywhere on time and an infuriating habit of spending half an hour in the loo (‘are you redecorating in there?’). But we were all right. We had a life together. And despite the hospital visits and low-level despair/exhaustion/viruses/financial worries at the end of each month (due to having spent too much at the start of each month), we loved each other.

  I’d imagined a life for us where we’d probably move out of London in a few years’ time, work, see friends, go on holidays, then retire. I envisaged seeing out my days as the British version of Jessica Fletcher from Murder She Wrote: writing and solving sanitised crime, followed by a nice cup of tea and a laugh-to-credits ending. My fantasy retirement was going to rock. But when I shared this vision with my husband, he didn’t seem too keen. ‘That’s it?’ was his response. ‘Everyone does that!’

  ‘Were you not listening,’ I tried again, ‘to the part about Jessica Fletcher?’

  He began to imply that Murder She Wrote was a work of fiction, to which I scoffed and said that next he’d be telling me that unicorns weren’t real. Then he stopped me in my tracks by announcing that he really wanted to live overseas someday.

  ‘“Overseas”?’ I checked I’d got this bit right: ‘As in, “not in this country”? Not near our seas?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh.’

  I’m not someone who relishes adventure, having had more than my fair share of it growing up and in my twenties. Nowadays, I crave stability. When the prospect of doing anything daring is dangled in front of me, I have a tendency to weld myself to my comfort zone. I’m even scared of going off piste on a menu. But my husband, it seemed, wanted more. This frightened me, making me worry that I wasn’t ‘enough’ for him, and the seed of doubt was planted. Then one wet Wednesday evening, he told me he’d been approached about a new job. In a whole other country.

  ‘What? When did this happen?’ I demanded, suspicious that he’d been applying for things on the sly.

  ‘Just this morning,’ he said, showing me an email that had indeed come out of the blue earlier that day, getting in touch and asking whether he’d be interested in relocating … to Denmark. The country of pastries, bacon, strong fictional females and my husband’s favourite childhood toy. And it was the makers of the small plastic bricks who were in search of my husband’s services.

  ‘Lego?’ I asked, incredulous as I read the correspondence. ‘You want us to move to Denmark so you can work for Lego?’ Was he kidding me? Were we in some screwed-up sequel to that Tom Hanks film where grown-ups get their childhood wishes granted? What next? Would Sylvanian Families appoint me their woodland queen? Were My Little Pony about to DM me inviting me to become their equine overlord? ‘How on earth has this happened? And was there a genie or a malfunctioning fairground machine involved?’

  My husband shook his head and told me that he didn’t know anything about it until today – that a recruitment agent he’d been in touch with ages ago must have put him forward. That it wasn’t something he actively went looking for but now it was here, well, he hoped we could at least consider it.

  ‘Please?’ he begged. ‘For me? I’d do it for you. And we could move for your job next time,’ he promised.

  I didn’t think that this was an entirely fair exchange: he knew full well that I’d happily stay put forever in a nice little town just outside the M25 to execute Project Jessica Fletcher. Denmark had never been a part of my plan. But this was something that he really wanted. It became our sole topic of conversation outside work over the next week and the more we talked about it, the more I understood what this meant to him and how much it mattered. If I denied him this now, a year into our marriage, how would that play out in future? Did I really want it to be one of the things we regretted? Or worse, that he resented me for? I loved him. So I agreed to think about it.

  We went to Denmark on a recce one weekend and visited Legoland. We laughed at how slowly everyone drove and spluttered at how much a simple sandwich cost. There were some clear attractions: the place was clean, the Danish pastries surpassed expectations, and the scenery, though not on the scale of the more dramatic Norwegian fjords, was soul-lifting.

  While we were there, a sense of new possibilities started to unfurl. We caught a glimpse of a different way of life and noticed that the people we met out there weren’t like folks back home. Aside from the fact that they were all strapping Vikings, towering over my 5′3″ frame and my husband’s 5′11″-on-a-good-day stature, the Danes we met didn’t look like us. They looked relaxed. They walked more slowly. They took their time, stopping to take in their surroundings. Or just to breathe.

  Then we came home, back to the daily grind. And despite my best efforts, I couldn’t get the idea out of my head, like a good crime plot unravelling clue by clue. The notion that we could make a change in the way we lived sparked unrest, where previously there’d been a stoic acceptance. Project Jessica Fletcher suddenly seemed a long way off, and I wasn’t sure I could keep going at the same pace for another 30 years. It also occurred to me that wishing away half your life in anticipation of retirement (albeit an awesome one) was verging on the medieval. I wasn’t a serf, tilling the land until I dropped from exhaustion. I was working in 21st century London. Life should have been good. Enjoyable. Easy, even. So the fact that I was dreaming of retirement at the age of 33 was probably an indicator that something had to change.

  I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been relaxed. Properly relaxed, without the aid of over-the-counter sleeping tablets or alcohol. If we moved to Denmark, I daydreamed, we might be able to get better at this ‘not being so stressed all the time’ thing … We could live by the sea. We could walk our dog on the beach every day. We wouldn’t have to take the tube anymore. There wouldn’t even be a tube where we’d be moving to.

  After our weekend of ‘other life’ possibilities, we were faced with a choice. We could stick with what we knew, or we could take action, before life became etched on our foreheads. If we were ever going to try to lead a more fulfilling existence, we had to start doing things differently. Now.

  My husband, a huge Scandophile, was already sold on Denmark. But being more cautious by nature, I still needed time to think. As journalist, I needed to do my research.

  Other than Sarah Lund’s Faroe Isle jumpers, Birgitte Nyborg’s bun and Borgen creator Adam Price’s knack of making coalition politics palatable for prime time TV, I knew very little about Denmark. The Nordic noir I’d watched had taught me two things: that the country was doused in perpetual rain and people got killed a lot. But apparently it was also a popular tourist destination, with official figures from Visit Denmark showing that numbers were up 26 per cent. I learned too that the tiny Scandi-land punched above its weight commercially, with exports including Carlsberg (probably the best lager in the world), Arla (the world’s seventh biggest dairy company and the makers of Lurpak), Danish Crown (where most of the UK’s bacon comes from) and of course Lego – the world’s largest toymaker. Not bad for a country with a population of 5.5 million (about the size of South London).

  ‘Five and a half million!’ I guffawed when I read th
is part. I was alone in the flat with just the dog for company, but he was doing his best to join in the conversation by snorting with incredulity. Or it might have been a sneeze. ‘Does five and a half million even qualify as a country?’ I asked the dog. ‘Isn’t that just a big town? Do they really even need their own language?’ The dog slunk off as though this question was beneath him, but I carried on unperturbed.

  I discovered that Denmark had been ranked as the EU’s most expensive country to live in by Ireland’s Central Statistics Office, and that its inhabitants paid cripplingly high taxes. Which meant that we would, too. Oh brilliant! We’ll be even more skint by the end of the month than we are already… But for your Danish krone, I learned, you got a comprehensive welfare system, free healthcare, free education (including university tuition), subsidised childcare and unemployment insurance guaranteeing 80 per cent of your wages for two years. Denmark, I was informed, also had one of the smallest gaps between the very poor and the very rich. And although no country in the world had yet achieved true gender equality, Denmark seemed to be coming close, thanks to a female PM and a slew of strong women in leadership positions. Unlike in the US and the UK, where already stressed out and underpaid women were being told to ‘lean in’ and do more, it looked like you could pretty much lean any way you fancied in Denmark and still do OK. Oh, and women weren’t handed sticks to beat themselves with if they weren’t ‘having it all’. This, I decided, was refreshing.

  Whereas in the US and the UK we’d fought for more money at work, Scandinavians had fought for more time – for family leave, leisure and a decent work-life balance. Denmark was regularly cited as the country with the shortest working week for employees, and the latest figures showed that Danes only worked an average of 34 hours a week (according to Statistic Denmark). By comparison, the Office of National Statistics found that Brits put in an average of 42.7 hours a week. Instead of labouring around the clock and using the extra earnings to outsource other areas of life – from cooking to cleaning, gardening, even waxing – Danes seemed to adopt a DIY approach.