10. Copenhagen

I took a train to Copenhagen. I like travelling by train in Denmark because you are forever getting on and off ferries. It takes longer, but it’s more fun. I don’t know how anyone could fail to experience that frisson of excitement that comes with pulling up alongside a vast white ship that is about to sail away with you aboard it. I grew up a thousand miles from the nearest ocean, so for me any sea voyage, however brief, remains a novelty. But I noticed that even the Danes and Germans, for whom this must be routine, were peering out of the windows with an air of expectancy as we reached the docks at Puttgarden and our train was shunted onto the ferry, the Karl Carstens.

Here’s a tip for you if you ever travel on a Scandinavian ferry. Don’t be the first off the train, because everyone will follow you, trusting you to find the way into the main part of the ship. I was in a group of about 300 people following a flustered man in a grey trilby who led us on a two-mile hike around the cargo deck, taking us up and down long avenues of railway carriages and huge canvas-sided trucks, casting irritated glances back at us as if he wished we would just go away, but we knew that our only hope was to stick to him like glue and, sure enough, he eventually found a red button on the wall, which when pressed opened a secret hatch to the stairwell.

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Overcome with new frissons of excitement, everyone clambered hurriedly up the metal stairs and made straight for the buffet. You could tell the nationality of the people by what they went for. The Germans all had plates piled high with meat and potatoes, the Danes had Carlsbergs and cream cakes, the Swedes one piece of Ryvita with a little dead fish on it. The queues were too much for me, so I went up on the top deck and stood out in the sunshine and gusty breeze as the boat cast off and, with a sound oddly like a washing machine on its first cycle, headed across the twelve miles of white-capped water between northern Germany and the Danish island of Lolland. There were about eight of us, all men, standing in the stiff breeze, pretending we weren’t perishing. Slowly Puttgarden receded behind us in a wake of foam and before long Lolland appeared over the horizon and began to glide towards us, like a huge low-lying sea monster.

You cannot beat sea travel, if you ask me, but there’s not much of it left these days. Even now grand plans are under way to run bridges or tunnels between all the main islands of Denmark and between Copenhagen and Sweden, and even across this stretch of water between Puttgarden and Rödbyhavn, so that people will be able to zip across it in ten minutes and scarcely notice that they have moved from one country to another. This new European impulse to blur the boundaries between countries seems a mite misguided to me.

At Rödbyhavn, our frissons spent, we all reboarded the train and rode listlessly through the rest of the afternoon to Copenhagen. Denmark was much neater and emptier than northern Germany had been. There were no factories as there had been in Germany and none of that farmyard clutter of abandoned tractors and rusting implements that you see in Belgium and Holland. Big electricity-generating wind turbines, their three-bladed fans spinning sluggishly, were dotted around the low hillsides and stood in ranks in the shallow coastal bays. It was a pity, I thought with that kind of distant casualness that comes with looking at things that are already sliding from view, that they hadn’t made them more attractive – like scaled-up Dutch windmills perhaps.

It seemed odd and sad that mankind could for centuries have so effortlessly graced the landscape with structures that seemed made for it – little arched bridges and stone farmhouses, churches, windmills, windingroads, hedgerows – and now appeared quite unable to do anything to the countryside that wasn’t like a slap across the face. These days everything has at best a sleek utility, like the dully practical windmills slipping past with the scenery outside my train window, or else it looks cheap and temporary, like the tin sheds and concrete hangars that pass for superstores on the edge of every medium-sized town. We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.

We reached Copenhagen’s central station at a little after five, but the station tourist office was already closed. Beside it stood a board with the names of thirty or so hotels and alongside each hotel was a small red light to indicate whether it was full or not. About two-thirds of the lights were lit, but there was no map to show where the hotels stood in relation to the station. I considered for a moment jotting down some of the names and addresses, but I didn’t altogether trust the board and in any case the addresses were meaningless unless I could find a map of the city.

Perplexed, I turned to find a Danish bag lady clasping my forearm and addressing me in a cheerful babble. These people have an uncanny way of knowing when I hit town. They must have a newsletter or something. We wandered together through the station, I looking distractedly for a map of the city on a wall, she holding onto my arm and sharing demented confidences with me. I suppose we must have looked an odd sight. A businessman stared at us over the top of a newspaper as we wandered past. ‘Blind date,’ I explained confidentially, but he just kept staring.

I could find no map of the city, so I allowed the lady to accompany me to the front entrance, where I disengaged her grip and gave her some small coins of various nations. She took them and wandered off without a backward glance. I watched her go and wondered why crazy people like train and bus stations so much. It is as if it’s their office (‘Honey, I’m off to the station to pick through the litter bins and mumble at strangers. See you at five!’). I can never understand why they don’t go to the beach or the Alps or someplace more agreeable.

I went to half a dozen hotels in the immediate neighbourhood of the station and they were all full. ‘Is there some reason for this?’ I asked at one. ‘Some convention or national holiday or something?’

‘No, it’s always like this,’ I was assured.

Am I wrong to find this exasperating? Surely it shouldn’t be too much, on a continent that thrives on trade and tourism, to arrange things so that a traveller can arrive in a city in late afternoon and find a room without having to traipse around for hours like a boat person. I mean here I was, ready to spend freely in their hotels and restaurants, subsidize their museums and trams, shower them with foreign exchange and pay their extortionate VAT of twenty- two per cent, all without a quibble, and all I asked in return was a place to lay my head.

Like most things when you are looking for them, hotels were suddenly thin on the ground in Copenhagen. I walked the length of the old part of the city without luck and was about to trudge back to the station to begin again when I came across a hotel by the waterfront called the Sophie Amalienborg. It was large, clean, modern and frightfully expensive, but they could give me a single room for two nights and I took it without hesitation. I had a steamy shower and a change of clothes and hit the streets a new man.

Is there anything, apart from a really good chocolate cream pie and receiving a large, unexpected cheque in the post, to beat finding yourself at large in a foreign city on a fair spring evening, loafing along unfamiliar streets in the long shadows of a lazy sunset, pausing to gaze in shop windows or at some church or lovely square or tranquil stretch of quayside, hesitating at street corners to decide whether that cheerful and homy restaurant you will remember fondly for years is likely to lie down this street or that one? I just love it. I could spend my life arriving each evening in a new city.

You could certainly do worse than Copenhagen. It is not an especially beautiful city, but it’s an endlessly appealing one. It is home to one and a half million people – a quarter of the Danish population – but it has the pace and ambience of a university town. Unlike most great cities, it is refreshingly free of any delusions of self-importance. It has no monuments to an imperial past and little to suggest that it is the capital of a country that once ruled Scandinavia. Other cities put up statues of generals and potentates. In Copenhagen they give you a little mermaid. I think that’s swell.

I walked along Nyhavn, a three-block-long street with a canal in the middle filled with tall-masted ships and lined with narrow, step-gabled seventeenth- and eighteenth-century houses, looking for all the world like a piece of Amsterdam gone astray. The neighbourhood was in fact originally settled by Dutch sailors and remained the haunt of jolly tars until recent times. Even now it has a vaguely raffish air in parts – a tattoo parlour and one or two of the sort of dive bars through whose windows you expect to see Popeye and Bluto trading blows – but these are fading relics. For years, restaurateurs have been dragging Nyhavn almost forcibly upmarket and most of the places now are yuppie bars and designer restaurants, but very agreeable places for all that, since the Danes don’t seem to be the least bit embarrassed about living well, which is after all how it should be.

The whole length of Nyhavn was lined with outdoor tables, with young, blond, gorgeous people drinking, eating and enjoying the unseasonably warm weather. I always wonder in Copenhagen what they do with their old people – they must put them in cellars or send them to Arizona – because everyone, without exception, is youthful, fresh-scrubbed, healthy, blond and immensely good-looking. You could cast a Pepsi commercial in Copenhagen in fifteen seconds. And they all look so happy.

The Danes are so full of joie de vivre that they practically sweat it. In a corner of Europe where the inhabitants have the most blunted concept of pleasure (in Norway, three people and a bottle of beer is a party; in Sweden the national sport is suicide), the Danes’ relaxed attitude to life is not so much refreshing as astonishing. Do you know how long World War II lasted for Denmark? It was over in a day – actually less than a day. Hitler’s tanks crossed the border under cover of darkness and had taken control of the country by dawn. As a politician of the time remarked, ‘We were captured by telegram.’ By evening they were all back in the bars and restaurants.

Copenhagen is also the only city I’ve ever been in where office girls come out at lunchtime to sunbathe topless in the city parks. This alone earns it my vote for European City of Culture for any year you care to mention.

I dined in a crowded, stylish basement restaurant halfway along Nyhavn. I was the only person who didn’t look as if he had just come from the set of Miami Vice. All the men wore shirts buttoned to the throat and the women had big earrings and intentionally distressed hair, which they had to shove out of the way each time they went to their plate. Every one of them was beautiful. I felt like Barney Rubble. I kept expecting the manager to come to the table and say, ‘Excuse me, sir, but would you mind putting some of this mousse on your hair?’ In the event, the staff treated me like an old friend and the food was so superb that I didn’t mind parting with the six-inch wad of banknotes that any meal in Copenhagen occasions.

When I climbed the steps to the street, darkness had fallen and the air had chilled, but people still sat outside at tables, drinking and talking enthusiastically, jackets draped over their shoulders. I crossed Kongens Nytorv, one of the city’s principal squares, sleepy and green, passed beneath the soft lights of the Hotel D’Angleterre, full of yet more happy diners, and headed up Strøget, Copenhagen’s main shopping street. Strøget is the world’s longest pedestrian street. Actually it’s five streets that run together for a little over a mile between Kongens Nytorv and the city’s other main square, Raadhuspladsen, at the Tivoli end. Every travel article you read about Copenhagen talks rapturously about Strøget, but I always feel vaguely disappointed by it. Every time I see it, it seems to have grown a tiny bit seedier. There are still many swish and diverting stores down at the Kongens Nytorv end – Georg Jensen for silver, Brødrene Andersen for clothes, Holmegaard for china and glass – but as you pass the half-way point Strøget swiftly deteriorates into tatty gift shops and McDonald’s, Burger Kings and other brightly lit temples of grease. The whole thing could do with a lot more in the way of benches and flagstones (it’s all patched asphalt now) and even – dare I say it? – the odd tub of geraniums. It’s a shame that in a country as wealthy and design-conscious as Denmark they can’t make the whole street – the words tumble involuntarily from my lips – more picturesque.

Still, it is pleasant to walk from one end of the downtown to the other without encountering cars, and just as you reach the western end, when you think that this is too, too dreary and you really should turn back, you step into the large and colourful Raadhuspladsen, or town hall square. One of the things they do in Europe that has always impressed me is let advertisers put colourful neon signs all over the roofs and top floors of the buildings around their main squares. You don’t notice the signs in the daytime because they are so high up, so the buildings preserve that air of stern magnificence appropriate to their function, but when darkness falls and you could do with a little gaiety, the same buildings suddenly light up with bright advertisements that illuminate the square and colour the faces of the people below.

I walked across to Tivoli, even though I could see from a distance that it was shut and darkened, as if under dust sheets. A sign on the gate said it wouldn’t open for a couple of weeks. As I walked back across the square towards Strøget I encountered a small crowd by the town hall and stopped to have a look.

Two police officers, a man and a woman, both young and blond and as gorgeous as everyone else in the city, were talking softly and with sympathy to a boy of about seventeen who had clearly ingested the sort of drugs that turn one’s brain into an express elevator to Pluto. Disorientated by this sudden zip through the cosmos, he had apparently stumbled and cracked his head; a trickle of blood ran from above his hairline to his downy cheek. The police officers were wearing the smartest commando-style uniforms I have ever seen – navy blue jump suits with lots of zips and velcro pockets and loops holding torches and notebooks and portable telephones and, for all I know, grappling hooks and rocket launchers. They looked as if between them they could handle any contingency, from outbreaks of Lassa fever to disarming a nuclear submarine.

And the thing is, this was probably the biggest thing they would have to deal with all evening. The Danes are almost absurdly law-abiding. The most virulent crime in the country is bike theft. In 1982, a year for which I just happen to have the facts at my fingertips, there were six murders in Copenhagen, compared with 205 in Amsterdam, a city of similar size, and 1,688 in New York. The city is so safe that Queen Margarethe used to walk from Amalienborg Palace to the shops every morning to buy flowers and vegetables just like a normal citizen. I once asked a Dane who guarded her in such circumstances, and he looked at me with surprise and replied, ‘Why, we all do,’ which I thought was rather sweet.

The police officers helped the boy to his feet and led him to the patrol car. The small crowd dispersed, but I found myself following them, almost involuntarily. I don’t know why I was so fascinated, except that I had never seen such gentle police. At the patrol car, I said in English to the female officer, ‘Excuse me, what will you do with the boy?’

‘We’ll take him home,’ she said simply, then raised her eyebrows a fraction and added: ‘I think he needs his bed.’

I was impressed. I couldn’t help thinking of the time I was stopped by police in America, made to stand with my arms and legs spread against a wall and frisked, then taken to a police station and booked because of an unpaid parking ticket. I was about seventeen myself at the time. God knows what they would have done to me if they had found me in a drugged stupor on a city bench. I suppose I’d be getting out of jail about now. ‘Will he be in trouble for this?’ I asked.

‘With his father, I think so, yes. But not with us. We are all young and crazy sometimes, you know? Good-night. Enjoy your stay in Copenhagen.’

‘Good-night,’ I said, and with the deepest admiration watched them go.

In the morning I felt like going to some museums. Copenhagen has splendid museums, which are strangely neglected, even by the Danes. I went first to the immense National Museum, opposite Christiansborg Palace, and had it more or less to myself. National museums, especially in small countries, are often feeble affairs – department-store mannequins dressed in sixteenth-century peasant costumes and a display case containing six Roman coins found in somebody’s back garden. But the Danish National Museum is both vast and richly endowed, and I spent a morning happily wandering through its miles of echoing rooms.

Afterwards I went to the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. Some museums have great treasures but are dull buildings and some have dull treasures but are great buildings, but the Glyptotek succeeds on both counts. It has an outstanding collection of Roman statuary and some of the finest Impressionist paintings to be seen anywhere, but the building itself is a joy – light, airy, impeccably decorated, with a warm and tranquil palm court full of gently dozing old people. (So that’s where they put them!)

But the best museum of all I saved for last – the Hirschsprung Collection in Østre Anlaeg Park. Everything about it is wonderful. It’s a pleasant and gentle stroll from the city centre and Østre Anlaeg is the best park in the city, in my experience (which is short but in this case attentive), for seeing secretaries sunning their breasts, but even without these huge and novel inducements it is worth seeking out because it is such a terrific and little-visited museum. It contains 884 paintings, assembled over forty years by one man, almost all of them from the nineteenth-century Skagen school of Danish painting, and all packed densely into twenty or so mostly small rooms. The paintings are all concerned with simple themes – summer landscapes, friends enjoying a casual dinner, a view of the sea from an open window, a woman at a sink – but the effect is simply enchanting, and you come away feeling as if you have spent the afternoon in some kind of marvellous and refreshing ionizer.

Afterwards, my spirits lifted, I had a long, happy walk through the surrounding park, moving methodically from one sunbathing blonde to another, enquiring if they needed any assistance with their suntan lotion. Actually, that’s not true. It wasn’t warm enough for sunbathing and in any case it was four in the afternoon and all the secretaries in Copenhagen were tucked away in their dark offices, their lovely breasts bagged away for at least another day, so I just walked around the park and imagined.

Early in the evening I went for a stroll along the city’s curiously uninspiring waterfront: a dull vista of fish-processing factories and industrial cranes. Far away across the still water a ship-repair yard was working late doing something shrill and drastic to a rusted freighter, which defended itself with hideous shrieks and a shower of sparks. I walked as far as the statue of the Little Mermaid perched forlornly but rather prettily on her rock at the harbour’s edge, and then strolled around a neighbouring park called Castellet, named for its star-shaped fortress guarding the harbour mouth, before finally stopping for a light and cheapish dinner at a café/bistro on Stockholmsgade.

The food was not remarkable, but the beer was good and the service was excellent since I was the only customer in the place. I had only to look up and smile hopefully and a fresh beer would be hustled to me. After a bit I didn’t even have to look up. A new bottle would magically appear as the last drop fell from the old one. This was my kind of bistro.

So I sat contentedly for two hours looking at some Danish newspapers that had been left on the table, trying to discern from the mass of unfamiliar words whether Margaret Thatcher had perchance fallen out of a moving car or World War III had started yet. But planet Earth seemed to be much as I had left it three weeks before, so instead I gazed out of the window at the passing traffic and lost myself in those aimless reveries that are the lone traveller’s equivalent of a night on the town.

Eventually I rose, paid the enormous bill and tottered a trifle wobbily out into the night. It was a fair hike back to my hotel, but I sustained myself en route by stopping at any place that looked bright and friendly and dispensed beer, of which Copenhagen possesses a gratifying plenitude, and thus passed the evening sitting alone in a series of corners, drinking far too many beers, smiling inanely at strangers and dribbling ash down my shirt. Sometime around one in the morning, as I was weaving down Strøget, suppressing the urge to break into song, I encountered an Irishman reeling down the street towards me, swearing crazily at anyone who passed.

‘You fucking cunts!’ he screamed at a genteel-looking couple whose pace immediately quickened. ‘You shit-head! You great Danish turd!’ he shouted at a young man who lowered his head and hurried on.

The odd thing was that the Irishman was dressed in a dapper grey suit. He looked like a successful businessman. God knows what was going on inside his addled head. He caught sight of me, but seemed to recognize me as a fellow drunk and let me pass with a listless wave of the hand, but immediately perked up to rain abuse on a middle-aged man. ‘You’re a piece of crap for sure, you stupid old twat!’ he said, to the man’s considerable surprise, then added mysteriously: ‘And I bet you’re staying in a fucking posh hotel!’ I stood with my arms crossed and watched as the Irishman reeled off down the street, shouting abuse at the buildings now, before he lurched abruptly to the left, as if yanked on a long rope, and disappeared down a side street, taking his expletives into the night.

I awoke in the morning feeling as if I had spent the night with my head attached to one of those machines they use to test shock absorbers. I looked at my watch. It was a quarter to ten. I had intended to catch a train to Sweden at half-past, and I had yet to pack and check out. I went to the bathroom to struggle through the morning hygiene and make low death noises, then wandered around the room dealing with personal effects as I chanced upon them – a sock went onto my foot, a map was forced into the rucksack, a Big Mac box that I had no recollection of acquiring went into the wastebasket – until at last I had assembled my possessions. I needed coffee the way Dan Quayle needs help with an IQ test.

I arrived at the front desk just in time to take up a position behind twenty-seven Italian visitors who, in that interesting way of the Italians, were all trying to check out at once. This didn’t help my fragile mood any. At last the Italians departed, moving across the lobby as if surgically linked, and the last I saw of them they were all trying to go out of the revolving door together. I gave my key to the young woman and waited as the computer hummed for a minute, as if getting up steam, and then abruptly spewed out several feet of paper, which was shorn of its sprocket holes and separated into sixteen sheets, the faintest of which was presented to me for inspection.

I was surprised to see that the bill contained a charge for phone calls. The night before – it all seemed so long ago now – I had tried to phone home, but all I got was a recording in Danish which I presumed was telling me that the international lines were engaged or that I was dialling wrongly or possibly that I should just go and fuck myself. In any case, I couldn’t get anywhere with it, and after three tries gave up. So I was taken aback to see myself billed for three phone calls. I explained this to the girl.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You must pay for any phone calls you try to make, whether or not you are connected.’

‘But that’s insane.’

She shrugged, as if to say, Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.

‘You’re telling me,’ I said slowly, my head feeling like the gong in a Rank movie, ‘that I have to pay for phone calls I didn’t make?’

‘Yes, that is correct.’

‘I didn’t use the spare blanket in the cupboard. Do I have to pay you for that, too?’ She looked steadily at me, clearly unaware that she was dealing with a person who could tip over the edge into violent insanity at any moment. ‘I didn’t use the shower cap,’ I went on. ‘Shall I give you a little something for that? I didn’t use one of the bars of soap or the trouser press. This is going to cost me a fortune, isn’t it?’

The girl continued to gaze levelly at me, though with a certain noticeable diminishment of goodwill. She had obviously weathered these storms before. ‘I am sorry you find these small charges inconvenient, but it is the normal practice in Copenhagen.’

‘Well, I think it stinks!’ I barked, then caught a glimpse of a seriously demented person in the mirror – wild hair, red face, Parkinson-like shakiness – and recognized myself. I gave her my credit card, scratched a wild signature on the bill, and with a haughty turn exited, regretting only that I didn’t have a cape to sling over my shoulder and an ebony stick with which to scatter the doormen.

I should have gone immediately to a café and had two cups of coffee and caught a later train. That would have been the sensible thing to do. Instead, still steaming, I proceeded towards the station at a pace that did my body no good at all, stopping en route at a bank on Strøget to cash a traveller’s cheque. It was for only $50 – a snippet in Scandinavia, mere pocket money until I reached Sweden in the evening and would require some serious cash – but for this I was charged the whopping sum of thirty-five kroner, well over ten per cent of the total. I suddenly realized why the Irishman from the night before was swearing at everyone. He had paid one Danish bill too many. ‘That’s an outrage,’ I said, clutching the bank receipt like bad news from a doctor. ‘I don’t know why I don’t just pin money to my jacket and let you people pick it off me!’ I shrilled, leaving a row of clerks and customers looking at each other as if to say, What’s his problem? Not enough coffee?

And it was in this dim and unfortunate frame of mind that I boarded the morning express to Gothenburg, abused a hapless young conductor for giving me the unwelcome news that it had no buffet car, and sat morosely in a corner, watching the garden-like suburbs of Copenhagen slip past, every nerve ending in my body tingling for caffeine.