Found in Translation #11

Velkommen Hjem!

Our family has been travelling a lot over the past month, which is one reason why I haven’t written a column recently! In February, for vinterferie, we went back to Scotland for a full week of catching up with family and friends that required such detailed daily logistics, we had to map the whole thing out on paper. Then my wife and I went to London for three days, our belated Christmas present to each other, thanks to my mother-in-law being willing to fly over from Scotland to make sure the teenagers were fed and taken care of. This week I went to Germany to visit a friend. It still amazes me that I can get on a train here and end up in another European country in a few hours! In between there has been much juggling of life and work. I’m writing this column whilst simultaneously supervising a birthday sleepover of five 12-year olds, assisting with the 14-year old’s homework on the US Sedition Act of 1918 and vaguely worrying that I’m not going to pass my Module 2 Dansk assessment next Tuesday. If I don’t, I’ll need to pay another deposit to the sprogskole but my six months is up so even though I haven’t been to class for several weeks, Tuesday is the day. I can sometimes do many things, but not necessarily very well and tonight feels very much like this!

These are things that nobody tells you when you move abroad, or perhaps they did and I just didn’t listen. I didn’t realise that every school holiday would be spent either visiting family and friends back in Scotland or hosting people visiting us, and that both would be lovely but neither would be quite as relaxing as lying by a swimming pool in the sun. I didn’t realise that as parents in a new land with children of a dependent age, you will rarely get to spend any time together as a couple outside your own home. You operate as a family unit, going everywhere as a three or four or five. I didn’t realise that living in rural Denmark would make it so hard to go to live music and Germany would often be my nearest option. 

Travelling means coming back again. I still worry that going back to Scotland will upset the delicate equilibrium we seem to have reached where the 14-year old and the 12-year old are happy and settled in Denmark. When we go back home, they get to be the Main Characters for a few days, showered with attention and early or late Christmas and birthday gifts, the centre of social events arranged so they can see people. It’s not what real life would be back in Scotland, complete with early mornings, strict school uniforms and piles of homework, most of which they don’t have here. This break, I was surprised though. We loved catching up with everyone but at the end of the week we left and there were no complaints from the teenagers. “Velkommen hjem!” the passport control officer at Copenhagen Airport said cheerily to the 12-year old, who was so stunned he replied something like “Jeg taler ikke dansk”. A year’s worth of Danish lessons and Duolingo have clearly had such an impact!

It’s an interesting question though. After over a year in Denmark, where is home now? As a family, we talk about “going home”, meaning Denmark, but none of us speak the language to any kind of passable standard, there is still so much we don’t know about the country and its infrastructure and we don’t have the right to stay here permanently. It’s possible, given the strictness of Denmark’s rules around permanent residency and citizenship, that we never will. Friends and family back in Scotland often ask us how long we think we will be here and we reply “As long as we’re happy and they let us stay!” But we’ve decided we want the teenagers to see out their education here in Denmark. Their school here is the right one for them: they’ve made firm friends, developed confidence and fostered skills they never had in Scotland. It was hard enough to uproot them from their lives at their age; we feel we can’t do it again.

But if Denmark doesn’t entirely feel like home, Scotland increasingly doesn’t either. I’ve always had a strange relationship with Scotland and I’ve realised this more and more here. My wife, who was born in Scotland and has a Scottish accent but grew up mostly in Wales, has an even stranger one. On one hand I feel the pressure to keep Scotland and its traditions and history alive in our home, as the teenagers’ accents and vocabulary become increasingly Americanised! On the other, I realise how few Scottish items we have around us and what a terrible job we’re probably doing here. I’m not sure Irn Bru (a lurid orange soda that tastes like nothing you’ll find in nature) and Tunnock’s Caramel Wafer biscuits count! So much “Scottishness” revolves around sport, mainly football and rugby, and I grew up in a home where these weren’t celebrated. We didn’t wear kilts or sing “Flower of Scotland”, the unofficial National Anthem, but the upside of this was I also didn’t absorb some of the bigotry that comes as part of this world. As I became a teenager, and particularly as a gay teenager, a lot of my influences were American. I wanted to move to New York, become a famous actress and hang out at the bars and clubs I saw on films and TV. I used to practise an American accent that sounded a lot like my teenagers sound now!

What was particularly hard last month was seeing the social inequality in Scotland in starker terms. We have been spoiled by Denmark, with its well funded public services, generous benefits system and beautifully maintained surroundings. I hope the situation will get better with the change in UK government but it will take a long time to reverse years of underfunding and neglect. It feels difficult when you don’t feel pride in the country where you were born. I’ve had a lot of conversations about this with Americans living here recently. They’re rightly appalled by Trump’s attacks on LGBTQ+ rights in particular, but in the UK the situation isn’t perfect either. A few weeks ago I wrote an article on Denmark’s pioneering of LGBTQ+ freedoms –  I read Danish newspaper articles written a century ago that were more respectful of transgender people’s lives than we see now. Denmark has a history of introducing legal change without fuss that the UK ties itself in anxiety-ridden knots over. I tell myself that what’s happening in the US could never happen in the UK but can I really be so sure? History tends to show us that as a minority group nothing is certain or permanent.

So where is home now? Last year, the 12-year old’s teacher said being an international feels like you have two homes. Increasingly though, I think it’s more complex than this. I find myself agreeing more with Helen Russell, author of The Year of Living Danishly, that home isn’t just where you live: it’s how you live. It’s about the world view, values and people you hold dear, and in that sense you can make your home anywhere in the world, as long as you have these to cling to. This week, our editor, Narcis Matache, also wrote on LinkedIn about the downsides of strong national identity, where physical borders can become mental borders, an excuse to treat others as “less than”. Maybe my weak sense of national identity isn’t such a weakness after all. 

I had a strange but lovely moment standing in an unfamiliar train station in a town outside Hamburg, making my way back to Denmark. Mixed in with all the German, which I don’t speak, some familiar Danish words rose to the surface, and they made me feel at home. Inspired by this, I sought out as many opportunities as I could to try unscripted Danish on the rest of the journey. I admired a woman’s massive and very well-behaved stor hunde (large dog). I helped an old lady with her stor taske (large bag). I achieved an absolute first for me by ordering in Danish at Lagkagehuset at Vejle Station and not having the assistant immediately reply in English. Maybe there’s hope for me in Tuesday’s dansk assessment! If I want to have any chance of calling Denmark my permanent home, I’ve got a long way to go!