Denmark

2018 – S.M.A.R.T. or not?

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At the outset of every year I pause and think about what I want to achieve. This year was different.

Or rather, I wanted to make sure that I would be more likely to achieve my goals, so I resolved to be smart and make ’em S.M.A.R.T. – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound.

Did I succeed? Yes and no.

Chess: ✅ I played every day for a month and got the rating I had set my mind on. (Then promptly lost it.)

Reading: ✅ One non-fictional book per month. Done.

Piano: ❎ I did play, but didn’t learn as many pieces as I had hoped. The temptation is to stick with the ones you know…

French: ❎ I didn’t learn anywhere near as much as I had planned, mainly because I had to focus on Danish.

Travel: ✅ I went to Morocco, Egypt, the Seychelles, Norway, Italy (thrice), and Denmark (plus Sweden), which is less than usual, but still acceptable, especially since Egypt, Italy and Norway was with the kids.

Fitness: ✅ The year was marred with injuries – first recovering after the paragliding incident, then a wonky neck, a messed up Achilles’ tendon, a tennis elbow, and finally a slipped disk – so running and biking and swimming suffered. I did manage the Paris marathon, and a runstreak of 100 days, but I’m nowhere near the distance goals I set myself for runs and biking. Nor did I learn to crawl, but I’ve racked up some 100 gym sessions, including an ironstreak of 40 days or so, which has meant three or four extra kilos’ worth of muscles.

Challenges: ✅ Apart from the aforementioned run- and ironstreaks I’ve successfully given up coffee, tried intermittent fasting for a month, I’ve become vegetarian, and I’m currently on a no sugar diet, so that’s gone well. Less well went my attempt at keeping a diary – I kept it up until Denmark, but then fell out of habit, unfortunately.

Work: ✅ I added Danish to my language combination, and continued working in Communications. In addition to that I MC’d a couple of conferences using participatory leadership, which was fun, too.

Blog: ✅ I increased my readership quite spectacularly this year (from just shy of 3,000 readers to 5,500, and from 5,000 views to nearly 10,000), which is really gratifying.

So. What worked and what didn’t? Some goals turned out to be insufficiently specific, such as “learn a piece of music”; others were unattainable due to factors beyond my control (the fitness targets) or had to be downgraded in terms of priority (French, when I was paid to go learn Danish), but overall it’s a sound principle, and one I will continue to use in 2019.

Now all I have to do is decide what those goals should be…

Danish and the Danish 5: XXX2 (extremely excellent expletives)

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Totally irrelevant football fans.

Everyone likes a nice ass, and no one likes a smart ass, the saying goes. The Danes don’t care. They have a thing for arses. All kinds.

The list of Danish idioms involving your rear end goes on and on. My favourite may be their expression for a job that is particularly badly done, which is then said to move up and down like King Volmar’s arse (gå op og ned som kong Volmers røv). Quite the epitaph.* But then Danes have always had a troubled relationship with their royals (and vice versa).

Getting an arse-full isn’t a quaint pre-metric measure of the kind Americans and Brits are so found of. No, få røven fuld means being taken for a fool. If you are instructed to seal your arse (lokke røven) you are told to be be quiet in the most direct way possible.

But Danes don’t just focus on the behind. They also have a healthy interest in fully frontal parts. This isn’t expressed in idioms so much as a very liberal approach to information about people’s (no longer) private parts. As we have seen, some individuals market their goods in public, but this is just an expression of a more widespread (!) phenomenon: even Danish public television has a series of programmes called “me and my pussy/dick” (“Jag og min fisse/pik“) where you are treated to close-ups of different… er… bits, while the unseen owners regale you with cautionary tales from the netherlands.

So that’s Mor Danmark for you. Unlike John Bull and Uncle Sam (both rather creepy characters that seem hell-bent on molesting you, one way or another), the Danish national character is down to Earth in the extreme, an old lady with a naughty streak, face probably like that of a happy prune, telling you the truth whether you want to or not.

[Tried to find a suitable illustration for this imaginary woman on the Internet. Take my word for it: don’t.]

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*I really hope he was one of those early Viking kings that invaded England, so that he can feature in that famous pamphlet, World’s Greatest British Lovers.

Danish and the Danish 3: XXX (extra exciting expressions)

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Sex sells. You’re reading this, aren’t you? So this post will be about porn.

Not the fleshy kind that elicits one-handed browsing tho (unless you are very particular in your tastes), but word porn. Specifically, some words and expressions that have amazed me in my efforts to decipher Danish and the Danish*.

First of all there’s swearing. There are two kinds of swearing, of course. The first is utilising curse words to emphasise things. Like all non-catholic countries there’s fewer curse words involving deities (beyond Gud and Satan), and more emphasis on bodily functions. So Danes utilise skidt and pisse (shit and piss) a lot – my favourite being pissegodt (literally tasty as piss) – but have also adopted that most prolific of American curses, the f word; only they pronounce it as fåkk.

The other type of swearing takes place when a mere promise isn’t enough. The Danish language has a peculiar expression here: Amager halshugg. Turns out Amager was the place of execution in Copenhagen; halshugg means decapitation. Interestingly, this expression is apparently very popular with recent middle eastern additions to the population, coming as they do from a culture where swearing of this kind is more prevalent. A Syrian refugee using a turn of phrase that’s shorthand for “may I be taken to the Danish capital’s executioner for capital punishment” – now that’s integration for you!

Overall there are quite a few historical references in Danish expressions, and few are flattering to a Swede: when something går ad Pommern til (lit. “goes to Pomerania” – an area in the Baltic that used to be Swedish), it means it’s going straight to Hell. If someone is being beaten up really badly they are slået til lirekassemænd – beaten until they become organ grinders – a profession associated with war invalids in the 19th century after – you guessed it! – wars with Sweden and others.

Who is to say Danes aren’t longing for revenge still? They might not say it out loud, but there are clues: if you compare, say, a Swedish matchbox – which features an innocent, naked child on the cover – with its Danish equivalent, you will find an old man there instead. Innocent enough, until you realise he is maritime war hero Tordenskiold, responsible for burning the Swedish enemy fleet.

Come on baby, light my fire...

So it all comes back to their history. It may be that the Danish sentiment is best summed up by the undying phrase of former prime minister Uffe Elleman-Jensen, who, after the Danes had voted against joining deeper cooperation with the rest of the EU, and then won their only European Football Championship to date, said: If you can’t join them, beat them.

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*For more word porn, you can read these posts from Germany and Slovenia, you pervs.

Danish and the Danish 2: bikes, boats and babes (of all kinds)

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The first thing you notice in Copenhagen are the bikes. They are everywhere. Everyone bikes, young and old alike, and if you’re too young or too frail, chances are you’re still being whisked around on a bike, but of the rickshaw kind.

Alternative bikes and an air bag alternative to bike helmets, Hövding.

The bike as a mode of transport is very well looked after: bike lanes in virtually every street, even separate bike bridges to take you across the harbour, and bicycle shops and repairmen on every corner, almost. What’s more, there’s a well functioning system of hand signals to help biker communicate their intentions, and, most importantly, all drivers respect bikers.

And so it is that I spend a good deal of my day biking around the capital. I got a rental bike from the NGO Baisikeli (Swahili for, yep, bicycle) which sends part of their profits (and old bikes) to Africa, so that felt good – although at less than 100€ for three weeks I’m not sure how much of a profit they’re making. It’s hyggelig, at any rate.

All I wanna do is… baisikeli?

The other mode of transport that is immediately noticeable in Copenhagen is the boat. Friendships and other party boats turn the harbour into a movable feast when the sun is out. Everything from dinghies and kayaks to tankers and cruise ships can be seen from the docks. It’s hardly unique for the capital either, as nearly all Danes have a close affinity with the sea:

Denmark is a small place and you are never more than 50 kilometres from the shore. The coastline is over 7,000 kilometres*, which means that shipping and fisheries have always played a great part in the economy, and their fleet (both navy and merchant) has always been strong.

You can even ride a black or white swan. What’s that all a-boat?

These circumstances also explain how they could found (and subsequently lose) an empire. Empire? Yes. Denmark used to rule Norway, southern Sweden, the Dutchies of Schleswig and Holstein, AND had colonies in India and the West Indies. Losing all that (but keeping Greenland and the Faroes islands still) must have contributed to forming the national psyche into what it is today.

So what is that character? I’ve already mentioned that the Danes are fairly liberal, and I don’t know whether it’s all the biking and the boating, but all Danes look great. Rarely have I seen so many babes (of both sexes) in on place.

Possibly this is a reflection of their society in general, because Danes are apparently the world’s happiest people, and we all know we look our best when we feel good. (All that happiness seems to work in other ways, too; I cannot remember when I last saw so many pregnant women and babes (of the newborn variety) out and about.)

So… happy on the inside, and pretty on the outside. But as a nation it seems Denmark is still marked by their 19th century losses and the occupation during World War Two. They were always enthusiastic members of NATO, but have had a troubled relationship with the EU. And they’re not very keen on foreigners coming to live in Denmark, even (or perhaps especially) when it’s refugees from far away. So there is a sense of “Oi, back off, this is ours, and you can’t come and take (even more of) it!”. Which is fair enough, I guess. Two weeks into my sojourn I feel a little like Oliver Twist, tho. “Please, sir, can I have some more?”

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* To put it differently: if it were a straight line it would stretch from Copenhagen to the Caribbean.