Sunday, April 18, 2004
There's a hilarious piece in yesterdays Guardian by Jacques Peretti, who's gone to Denmark and has found it wanting. Of pubs with TVs and Sky, mostly. This I found quite amusing, but also relieving, I'm happy to see that Denmark has not turned all British (yet) and that in this respect, sanity still rules.
'On arrival in Scandinavia, the shame of of simply being British
is hard to take. While English children step off the plane eating
chips and bogeys and elastic bands and speaking a kind of
medieval argot of grunts and Michael Jackson Ee-hees!,
Scandinavian children eat only steamied, diagonally-cut vegetables
and speak English like Lady Diana.'
- This is actually not far off, as I can always tell which kids are from which country, when I fly home. The English kids are all over the place, usually carrying a packet of crisps and wearing oversize footballshirts, while Danish kids are usually blindingly blond (usually, I said!) and usually wear something or other from Lego. (Lego Wear that is, we do not randomly overglue our kids with Lego blocks.)
Peretti has also come actross 'men in beards and rainbow braces hoeing fields and waving cheerily to anyone - absolutely anyone - driving past in a car'. This is something I always wondered about too, and I bloody well grew up there; some people will wave at anything. Kids will wave at all forms of transportation, since I guess, it moves (or whatever), but grown people? Is it a way to make things slow down, if nothing more than for one moment, in order to personalise, uhm, industrialisation?
Peretti also laments the upcoming demise of Christiania (me too, especially since the prospect of luxury flats is just ridiculous - moving out some people in order to facilitate other (rich) people, who have much more choice than your average students, who gets no choice at all) within the country of, what he calls 'goody two-shoeness' - a country in which sanity almost over-rules and where generel gentrification makes everything and everyone seem the same.
Oh, I just know where he is coming from, bringing forward the best and the worst of Denmark, and then we're back at my usualy conundrum: must Denmark necessarily be so orderly (dare I say anal?) in order to facilitate all those benefits that we all love much? Can a country only function this way, if all and sundry are the same?
Today is the day of the London Marathon, but it's raining so I haven't bothered with checking it out, even though it happens pretty much on my doorstep. I did contemplate cheering on the lovely Jonny, given that he is 2-1 at Ladbrokes (or whatever, I'm not good at these things) and is 'certainly not a sick boy' at all (?!), but, frankly, the sight of a sweating, half-gagging semi-celeb, clad in shorts and socks rushing past, leaving a whiff of pitts in the air would be enough to ruin my childish dreams of the glamorous people forever, so I stayed in bed.
'On arrival in Scandinavia, the shame of of simply being British
is hard to take. While English children step off the plane eating
chips and bogeys and elastic bands and speaking a kind of
medieval argot of grunts and Michael Jackson Ee-hees!,
Scandinavian children eat only steamied, diagonally-cut vegetables
and speak English like Lady Diana.'
- This is actually not far off, as I can always tell which kids are from which country, when I fly home. The English kids are all over the place, usually carrying a packet of crisps and wearing oversize footballshirts, while Danish kids are usually blindingly blond (usually, I said!) and usually wear something or other from Lego. (Lego Wear that is, we do not randomly overglue our kids with Lego blocks.)
Peretti has also come actross 'men in beards and rainbow braces hoeing fields and waving cheerily to anyone - absolutely anyone - driving past in a car'. This is something I always wondered about too, and I bloody well grew up there; some people will wave at anything. Kids will wave at all forms of transportation, since I guess, it moves (or whatever), but grown people? Is it a way to make things slow down, if nothing more than for one moment, in order to personalise, uhm, industrialisation?
Peretti also laments the upcoming demise of Christiania (me too, especially since the prospect of luxury flats is just ridiculous - moving out some people in order to facilitate other (rich) people, who have much more choice than your average students, who gets no choice at all) within the country of, what he calls 'goody two-shoeness' - a country in which sanity almost over-rules and where generel gentrification makes everything and everyone seem the same.
Oh, I just know where he is coming from, bringing forward the best and the worst of Denmark, and then we're back at my usualy conundrum: must Denmark necessarily be so orderly (dare I say anal?) in order to facilitate all those benefits that we all love much? Can a country only function this way, if all and sundry are the same?
Today is the day of the London Marathon, but it's raining so I haven't bothered with checking it out, even though it happens pretty much on my doorstep. I did contemplate cheering on the lovely Jonny, given that he is 2-1 at Ladbrokes (or whatever, I'm not good at these things) and is 'certainly not a sick boy' at all (?!), but, frankly, the sight of a sweating, half-gagging semi-celeb, clad in shorts and socks rushing past, leaving a whiff of pitts in the air would be enough to ruin my childish dreams of the glamorous people forever, so I stayed in bed.
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