The Year of Living Danishly (2 page)

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.

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.