The Year of Living Danishly Read Free Page A

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.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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