The Year of Living Danishly Read online

  Denmark was also the holder of a number of world records – from having the world’s best restaurant, in Copenhagen’s Noma, to being the most trusting nation and having the lowest tolerance for hierarchy. But it was the biggie that fascinated me: our potential new home was officially the happiest country on earth. The UN World Happiness Report put this down to a large gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, high life expectancy, a lack of corruption, a heightened sense of social support, freedom to make life choices and a culture of generosity. Scandinavian neighbours Norway and Sweden nuzzled alongside at the top of the happy-nation list, but it was Denmark that stood out. The country also topped the UK Office of National Statistics’ list of the world’s happiest nations and the European Commission’s well-being and happiness index – a position it had held onto for 40 years in a row. Suddenly, things had taken a turn for the interesting.

  ‘Happy’ is the holy grail of the lifestyle journalist. Every feature I’d ever written was, in some way, connected to the pursuit of this elusive goal. And ever since defacing my army surplus bag with the lyrics to the REM song in the early 1990s, I’d longed to be one of those shiny, happy people (OK, so I missed the ironic comment on communist propaganda, but I was only twelve at the time).

  Happy folk, I knew, were proven to earn more, be healthier, hang on to relationships for longer and even smell better. Everyone wanted to be happier, didn’t they? We certainly spent enough time and money trying to be. At the time of researching, the self-help industry was worth $11 billion in the US and had earned UK publishers £60 million over the last five years. Rates of antidepressant use had increased by 400 per cent in the last fifteen years and were now the third most-prescribed type of medication worldwide (after cholesterol pills and painkillers). Even those lucky few who’d never so much as sniffed an SSRI or picked up a book promising to boost their mood had probably used food, booze, caffeine or a credit card to bring on a buzz.

  But what if happiness isn’t something you can shop for? I could almost feel the gods of lifestyle magazines preparing to strike me down as I contemplated this shocking thought. What if happiness is something more like a process, to be worked on? Something you train the mind and body into? Something Danes just have licked?

  One of the benefits of being a journalist is that I get to be nosy for a living. I can call up all manner of interesting people under the pretext of ‘research’, with the perfect excuse to ask probing questions. So when I came across Denmark’s ‘happiness economist’ Christian Bjørnskov, I got in touch.

  He confirmed my suspicions that our Nordic neighbours don’t go in for solace via spending (thus ruling out 90 per cent of my usual coping strategies).

  ‘Danes don’t believe that buying more stuff brings you happiness,’ Christian told me. ‘A bigger car just brings you a bigger tax bill in Denmark. And a bigger house just takes longer to clean.’ In an approximation of the late, great Notorious B.I.G.’s profound precept, greater wealth means additional anxieties, or in Danish, according to my new favourite app, Google Translate, the somewhat less catchy ‘mere penge, mere problemer’.

  So what did float the Danes’ boats? And why were they all so happy? I asked Christian, sceptically, whether perhaps Danes ranked so highly on the contented scale because they just expected less from life.

  ‘Categorically not,’ was his instant reply. ‘There’s a widely held belief that Danes are happy because they have low expectations, but when Danes were asked about their expectations in the last European study, it was revealed that they were very high and they were realistic.’ So Danes weren’t happy because their realistic expectations were being met; they were happy because their high expectations were also realistic? ‘Exactly.’

  ‘There’s also a great sense of personal freedom in Denmark,’ said Christian. The country is known for being progressive, being the first to legalise gay marriage and the first European country to allow legal changes of gender without sterilisation.

  ‘This isn’t just a Scandinavian thing,’ Christian continued. ‘In Sweden, for instance, many life choices are still considered taboo, like being gay or deciding not to have children if you’re a woman. But deciding you don’t want kids when you’re in your thirties in Denmark is fine. No one’s going to look at you strangely. There’s not the level of social conformity that you find elsewhere.’

  That’s not to say that your average Dane wasn’t conforming in other ways, Christian warned me. ‘We all tend to look very much alike,’ he told me. ‘There’s a uniform, depending on your age and sex.’ Females under 40 apparently wore skinny jeans, loose-fitting T-shirts, leather jackets, an artfully wound scarf and a topknot or poker-straight blonde hair. Men under 30 sported skinny jeans, high tops, slogan or band T-shirts and 90s bomber jackets with some sort of flat-top haircut. Older men and women preferred polo shirts, sensible shoes, slacks and jackets. And everyone wore square Scandi-issue black-rimmed glasses. ‘But ask a Dane how they’re feeling and what they consider acceptable and you’ll get more varied answers,’ said Christian. ‘People don’t think much is odd in Denmark.’

  He explained how social difference wasn’t taken too seriously and used the example of the tennis club to which he belonged. This immediately conjured up images of WASP-ish, Hampton’s-style whites, Long Island iced tea, and bad Woody Allen films but Christian soon set me straight. ‘In Denmark, there’s no social one-upmanship involved in joining a sports club – you just want to play sports. Lots of people join clubs here, and I play tennis regularly with a teacher, a supermarket worker, a carpenter and an accountant. We are all equal. Hierarchies aren’t really important.’

  What Danes really cared about, Christian told me, was trust: ‘In Denmark, we trust not only family and friends, but also the man or woman on the street – and this makes a big difference to our lives and happiness levels. High levels of trust in Denmark have been shown time and time again in surveys when people are asked, “Do you think most people can be trusted?” More than 70 per cent of Danes say: “Yes, most people can be trusted.” The average for the rest of Europe is just over a third.’

  This seemed extraordinary to me – I didn’t trust 70 per cent of my extended family. I was further gobsmacked when Christian told me that Danish parents felt their children were so safe that they left babies’ prams unattended outside homes, cafés and restaurants. Bikes were apparently left unlocked and windows were left open, all because trust in other people, the government and the system was so high.

  Denmark has a miniscule defence budget and, despite compulsory national service, the country would find it almost impossible to defend itself if under attack. But because Denmark has such good relations with its neighbours, there is no reason to fear them. As Christian put it: ‘Life’s so much easier when you can trust people.’

  ‘And does Denmark’s social welfare system help with this?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, to an extent. There’s less cause for mistrust when everyone’s equal and being looked after by the state.’

  So what would happen if a right-wing party came to power or the government ran out of money? What would become of the fabled Danish happiness if the state stopped looking after everyone?

  ‘Happiness in Denmark isn’t just dependent on the welfare state, having the Social Democrats in power or how we’re doing in the world,’ Christian explained. ‘Danes want Denmark to be known as a tolerant, equal, happy society. Denmark was the first European country to abolish slavery and has history as a progressive nation for gender equality, first welcoming women to parliament in 1918. We’ve always been proud of our reputation and we work hard to keep it that way. Happiness is a subconscious process in Denmark, ingrained in every area of our culture.’

  By the end of our call, the idea of a year in Denmark had started to sound (almost) appealing. It might be good to be able to hear myself think. To hear myself living. Just for a while. When my husband got home, I found myself saying in a very small voice, that didn’t seem to be coming out
of my mouth, something along the lines of: ‘Um, OK, yes … I think … let’s move.’

  Lego Man, as he shall henceforth be known, did a rather fetching robotics-style dance around the kitchen at this news. Then he got on the phone to his recruitment consultant and I heard whooping. The next day, he came home with a bottle of champagne and a gold Lego mini-figure keyring that he presented to me ceremoniously. I thanked him with as much enthusiasm as I could muster and we drank champagne and toasted our future.

  ‘To Denmark!’

  From a vague idea that seemed unreal, or at least a long way off, plans started to be made. We filled in forms here, chatted to relocation agents there and started to tell people about our intention to up sticks. Their reactions were surprising. Some were supportive. A lot of people told me I was ‘very brave’ (I’m really not). A couple said that they wished they could do the same. Many looked baffled. One friend quoted Samuel Johnson at me, saying that if I was tired of London I must be tired of life. Another counselled us, in all seriousness, to ‘tell people you’re only going for nine months. If you say you’re away for a year, no one will keep in touch – they’ll think you’re gone for good.’ Great. Thanks.

  When I resigned from my good, occasionally glamorous job, I faced a similarly mixed response. ‘Are you mad?’, ‘Have you been fired?’ and ‘Are you going to be a lady of leisure?’ were the three most common questions. ‘Possibly’, ‘No’ and ‘Certainly not’, were my replies. I explained to colleagues that I planned to work as a freelancer, writing about health, lifestyle and happiness as well as reporting on Scandinavia for UK newspapers. A few whispered that they’d been thinking of taking the freelance plunge themselves. Others couldn’t get their heads around the idea. One actually used the term, ‘career suicide’. If I hadn’t been terrified before, I was now.

  ‘What have I done?’ I wailed, several times a day. ‘What if it doesn’t work out?’

  ‘If it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t work out,’ was Lego Man’s pragmatic response. ‘We give it a year and if we don’t like it, we come home.’

  He made it all sound simple. As though we’d be fools not to give it a go.

  So, after welling up on my last day at work, I came home and carefully wrapped up the dresses, blazers and four-inch heels that had been my daily uniform for more than a decade and packed them away. I wouldn’t need these where we were headed.

  One Saturday, six removal men arrived at our tiny basement flat demanding coffee and chocolate digestives. Between us, we packed all our worldly possessions into 132 boxes before loading them into a shipping container to be transported to the remote Danish countryside. This was happening. We were moving. And not to some cosy expat enclave of Copenhagen. Just as London is not really England, Copenhagen is not, I am reliably informed, ‘the real Denmark’. Where we were going, we wouldn’t need an A–Z, a tube pass or my Kurt Geiger discount card. Where we were going, all I’d need were wellies and a weatherproof mac. We were heading to the Wild West of Scandinavia: rural Jutland.

  The tiny town of Billund to the south of the peninsular had a population of just 6,100. I knew people with more Facebook friends than this. The town was home to Lego HQ, Legoland and … well, that was about it, as far as I could make out.

  ‘You’re going somewhere called “Bell End”?’ was a question I got from family and friends more times than I care to remember. ‘Billund,’ I’d correct them. ‘Three hours from Copenhagen.’

  If they sounded vaguely interested, I’d elaborate and tell them about how a carpenter called Ole Kirk Christiansen started out in the town in the 1930s. How, in true Hans Christian Andersen style, he was a widower with four children to feed who started whittling wooden toys to make ends meet. How he went on to produce plastic building blocks under the name ‘Lego’, from the Danish phrase ‘leg godt’, meaning ‘play well’. And how my husband was going to work for the toymaker. Those curious to know more usually had a Lego fan in their household. Those without children tended to ask about opportunities for winter sports.

  ‘So, Denmark, it’s cold there, right?’

  ‘Yes. It’s Baltic. Literally.’

  ‘So, er, can you ski or snowboard?’

  ‘I can, yes. But not in Denmark.’

  Then I’d have to break it to them that the highest point in the whole country was only 171 m above sea level and that you’d have to travel to Sweden for skiing.

  ‘Oh well, it’s all Scandinavia, isn’t it?’ was the typical response from those angling for a free chalet, to which I’d have to explain that, sadly, the closest resort was 250km away.

  Many struggled to get their heads around precisely which of the Nordic countries we were moving to, with various leaving cards wishing us the ‘Best of luck in Finland!’ and my mother telling everyone we were off to Norway. In many respects, it may as well have been. The downshift from London life to rural Scandinavia was always going to be a shock to the system.

  Once the removal men had gone, all we had left was a suitcase of clothes and the entire contents of our drinks cabinet, which apparently we weren’t allowed to export due to customs laws. We convened an ad hoc ‘drink the flat dry’ party in response to this, but it turns out that drinking three-year-old limoncello from a plastic cup in a cold, empty room on a school night isn’t quite as jolly as it might sound. Everyone had to stand or sit on the floor and voices echoed around the furniture-less space. There was no sense of occasion and it wasn’t anything like the epic, cinematic send-offs that you see in films. For most people, life was carrying on as normal. Us leaving the country wasn’t much of a big deal to anyone other than a few close friends and family. Some made an effort. One friend brought over mini Battenbergs and a thermos of tea (we had no kettle, let alone tea bags by this point). I was so ridiculously grateful, I could have wept. Thinking back, I may have done. Another made a photo montage of our time together in the capital. A third lent us a lilo to sleep on for our final night.

  A damp, Edwardian terraced flat with no furniture, in winter, in the dead of night, is a very sad place indeed. We lay uncomfortably on the not-quite-double lilo and tried to stay still lest we bounce the other person off onto the hard wooden floor. Eventually, Lego Man started to breathe more deeply so that I knew he was asleep. Unable to join him, I stared at the crack in the ceiling in the shape of a question mark that we’d planned to fill in ages ago. It felt as though we’d lost everything, or we were squatters, or had just gone through a divorce, despite the fact that we were lying next to each other. Just for that night, we had nothing. I stared at the plaster question mark for what felt like hours until the street lamp outside the window went off and we were finally plunged into total darkness.

  The next day we had lunch with family and a couple of close friends in a café near our flat. There were chairs! And plates! It was heaven. There were also tears (mine, my mother’s, and those of a school friend whose alcohol tolerance had been severely diminished by the recent arrival of twins), as well as beer, gin and gifts of several more Scandi box sets to get us in the mood. And then, a few hours later, the taxi arrived to take us to the airport. I suddenly wanted to linger longer in London, to take in every detail of the city as we drove through it by dusk, to memorise every twinkling light along the river so that I could keep hold of it until I next came back for a visit. I wanted to Have A Moment. But the driver wasn’t the sentimental type. Instead he turned on some hard-core US rap and unwrapped a Magic Tree air freshener.

  We sat in silence after this. I kept my mind occupied by going over and over my plan of action, ‘keep busy, then you can’t be sad!’ being the mildly manic philosophy I’d adhered to for the past 33 years. My loosely thought-out plan was this: to integrate as far as possible in an attempt to understand Denmark and what made its inhabitants so happy. Up to this point, my typical New Year’s Resolutions consisted of ‘do more yoga’, ‘read Stephen Hawking’ and ‘lose half a stone’. But this year, there was to be just one: ‘live Danishly’. Yes, I e
ven invented a new Nordic adverb for the project. Over the next twelve months, I would investigate all aspects of living Danishly. I would consult experts in their fields and beg, bully or bribe them to share their secrets of the famed Danish contentment, and demonstrate how Danes do things differently.

  I had been checking the weather in Denmark on an hourly basis during our last few days in London, prompting my first question – how do Danes stay upbeat when it’s minus ten every day? Revelations about how much we’d both take home after taxes were also eye-opening. Doesn’t a 50 per cent tax rate really stick in everyone’s craw? Lego Man remained stoic in the face of possible penury and focussed instead on all the great examples of Scandinavian design that kept being featured in weekend living supplements. Could the much-celebrated Danish aesthetic influence the nation’s mood? I wondered. Or are they just high on dopamine from all those pastries?

  From education to the environment, genetics to gynaecological chairs (really), and family to food (seriously, have you tried a freshly baked pastry from Denmark? They’re delicious. Why wouldn’t Danes be delighted with life?), I decided I would set out to discover the key to getting happy in every area of modern life. I would learn something new each month and make changes to my own life accordingly. I was embarking on a personal and professional quest to discover what made Danes feel so great. The result would, I hoped, be a blueprint for a lifetime of contentment. The happiness project had begun.

  To ensure that each of my teachers walked the talk, I would ask every expert to rank themselves on a happiness scale between one and ten, with ten being delirious, zero being miserable, and the middling numbers being a bit ‘meh’. As someone who’d typically have placed herself at a perfectly respectable six before my year of living Danishly, this proved an interesting exercise. Despite having been commended for Julie Andrews-style upbeat cheerfulness in every work-leaving card I’d ever had, I soon learned that there’s a difference between eager-to-please nice-girl syndrome and feeling genuinely good about yourself. I’d asked Christian for his score during our preliminary phone call, and he admitted that ‘Even being Danish can’t make everything absolutely perfect,’ but then followed up with, ‘I’d give myself an eight’. Not bad. So what would have made the professor of happiness even happier? ‘Getting a girlfriend,’ he told me, without hesitation. Anyone interested in a date with Denmark’s most eligible professor can contact the publisher for more details. For everyone else, here’s how to get happy, Danish-style.