Godt Nytår!
It’s a whole new year! It’s Monday morning, January 6th, and the grind of the daily routine has started again. The alarm has gone off and it’s so dark, it might as well be 2.45 am, not 6.45 am. Obviously, it’s raining, heavily. I’m chasing kids about breakfast, sports kit and water bottles. The cat has resumed her own weekday routine of yowling as though possessed by a demon at Frede, the ginger cat who lives on our street and comes every morning to sit outside our window and torment her. Frede is clearly not at all threatened by our cat’s defence ritual but our cat still feels the need to enact it. I don’t know where Frede went over Christmas but we didn’t see him. Maybe he went on a sunshine holiday somewhere. Maybe our cat actually missed him. Maybe I’m thinking too much about the social lives and non-existent thought patterns of two cats. Anyway, he’s back and their pointless duet continues. Maybe it’s not even a duet. Maybe it’s simply a performance that our cat’s giving, for free, and Frede is the audience. I really need to stop thinking so much about this.
So everything has gone back to normal but January is also a momentous month for our family. On January 22nd, it’ll be an entire year since I got on a plane with a teenager, a pre-teen with the sass of twenty teenagers, a cat in a basket and my mother-in-law for moral support, to start our new life in Denmark. One year ago today, I was in an almost-empty house in Scotland, sleeping on a single mattress on the floor under a borrowed Peppa Pig duvet, wondering what kind of adventure was awaiting us. I was excited and I was worried. How would the kids settle? Would I ever find a job? Would we have friends? Would we be happy?
One of my favourite writers and broadcasters in the UK, Annie Macmanus (Changes with Annie Macmanus | Substack), talks about documenting the changes that have taken place in your life over a year and how you feel you’ve changed. I don’t know where to start. There was so much change in 2024. We moved country and we moved jobs. The kids moved school. The trucks arrived in late January with all our furniture and we moved that around, then we packed it all up and moved house again, this time unplanned, to be nearer to the kids’ school. There was almost no aspect of our lives that didn’t contain huge change in 2024.
Annie Macmanus is Irish, not Danish, but her reflective approach does feel quite native to Denmark. Later on Monday I go to a yoga class where we talk about taking time to process the year that has passed and not rushing into making changes for 2025. There can be so much pressure in the UK to plan a major overhaul of your life/body/wardrobe/ relationship/house before the clock has struck midnight on New Year’s Eve. In 2025 I would like as little change as possible. I would like to get used to the changes we have already been through, thanks. I would like to give the changes time to become normality.
If you’re like me, your social media and your life will have been filled with to-do lists over the past few weeks, rushing towards the future. I thought I’d take a Danish approach and do some quiet, realistic reflection instead.
5 things I loved in Denmark in 2024
- The joy of coffee and pastries. I have been trying to appreciate the small, simple things, and Denmark does a coffee and a pastry like no other place I have ever found.
- Riding my bike. Admittedly it’s not as much fun in the rain, and at the moment it’s always raining. I bought some rain trousers (get me!) but it’s still a challenge just now. However, I really do love riding my bike around. Sometimes I put my earphones in (if there’s a law against this please don’t report me – just leave me a quiet comment) and pretend I’m a character in a movie. Bliss.
- A quieter pace of life. We’ve been here a whole year but I still marvel at the lack of visible stress in Danish people. They aren’t drumming their fingers impatiently, cursing the elderly person in front of them at the supermarket. Airport security staff help you sort your things and wish you a pleasant journey instead of shouting at you. People take time to appreciate their surroundings. They’re not always anxious about moving on to the next thing, then the next thing. It’s very endearing.
- Beautiful places. I don’t live in one of Denmark’s “big four” cities. I live in a rural city (that in the UK would be called a small town), albeit with the world’s biggest toy company in the middle of it. Yet we’re surrounded by beautiful places: art galleries, design museums, well designed parks. Even the waiting room at my doctor’s surgery, in a nearby city/small town which is definitely not international, has an ever-changing selection of art on the walls, sustainable wooden furniture and good lighting. That city/town, despite (and I mean this kindly) being extremely unremarkable in every other way, has the official title of Denmark’s City of Sculpture. All this is not normal in the UK. It makes you feel like you matter, regardless of where you live or how much money you have. It’s a good feeling.
- Kind people. People in Denmark are very kind. I’ve had this conversation with so many internationals. We have needed so much help since we got here and so many people have come to our rescue, both Danes and internationals. Here, I have never had a builder or a plumber or a mechanic treat me like an idiot because I’m a woman. I have never called up a company and had someone be rude to me. I have never walked past a group of teenagers in Denmark and felt in any way disrespected. All this should be normal and yet in so many places in the world it isn’t.
5 things I got (slightly) better at in 2024
- Using tech. God, Denmark has so many apps. Whether it’s contacting my doctor or booking a train ticket or electronically signing a legal document or communicating with my children’s school, there is an app for it in Denmark. There is no option but to embrace it!
- Yoga. I’m not slimmer or younger-looking since taking up yoga but I don’t walk like I’m 100 for the first half hour of each morning any more and I can do a plank with ease. I think this is going to serve me better in middle age than being skinny enough to wear a crop top.
- Cooking. I’m sort of learning to love cooking. It’s a slow burn relationship largely borne out of having no choice (I really miss Marks & Spencer food hall in the UK) and eating out being eye-wateringly expensive but it’s ok. We’re getting there.
- Relaxing. When I started yoga seriously last year I could not lie quietly and still for five minutes at the end of the class without laughing. I didn’t really know how to relax and I felt very self-conscious. Now, occasionally I catch myself snoring.
- Speaking Danish. It’s always going to be a work in progress, and talking to Brooke Fossey, aka Instagram’s Nearly Danish Dame, about all of this was very reassuring. But I’m pretty good at numbers (maybe I should take up Danish bingo) and I can now be trusted to collect and return parcels and order coffee. It’s a start.
5 things I didn’t get better at in 2024
- Winter bathing. It’s a bit of a cult here, right? I had grand ideas that I would try it on January 2nd. I arranged to meet friends at the beach in Vejle. There was even a sauna and it all sounded very #hygge. Then I got hopelessly lost trying to drive there while the kids got progressively more annoyed in the back of the car, got stuck on a forest track while getting increasingly desperate for the bathroom, cried while repeating “I don’t know what to do” over and over, then reversed my car into a tree. We didn’t make it to the beach. No #verydemureverymindful pictures were taken. The car had minor damage and the kids got a lesson in crisis management and how parents are only human! Stay humble, people. You may think you’re flying in your new life but don’t think you’re anything special!
- Writing my novel. I really thought this was going to happen when I moved to Denmark. I had read Helen Russell’s “The Year of Living Danishly” and I thought that would be me: at the end of a year I’d be holding my completed book. It’s all so laughable now! Spoiler: I didn’t write a novel. I didn’t come anywhere close. Instead I did a lot of washing, cooking, wiping children’s tears and family admin. My friend Jill actually did laugh when I told her about my failed plan. I don’t think it’s because she thinks I’m a terrible writer (though maybe she does!) but she was so right – it was a completely unrealistic plan. Maybe 2025 will be my year. Maybe it won’t, and that’s ok.
- Fixing things. I will never have the Danish enthusiasm for doing house and garden jobs yourself, or the skill. When I post in the local online group asking if anyone knows a tradesperson who does X job, I do not want someone to reply “I can lend you a tool for that”. That is the last thing I want. I want someone to do the job. Preferably cheaply and well. That person will not be me, ever.
- Getting up early. I’ve learned how much the Danish love a morning. The school and work day starts at 7.30 am, at the latest 8 am. At my partner’s work, people have to be stopped from coming down to the restaurant for lunch before 11 am. 11! 11 am is coffee and pastry time for me! I am a night person. My best ideas come to me at around 11 pm, when I should be sleeping. I am completely unable to get to bed much before midnight. Obviously, I’m an adult so I have no choice but to get up at 6.45 am or I doubt my kids would make it to school. But I’ll never like it. I’ve come to realise that I’ll spend the first hour of every morning groaning “I hate this! I feel like death!” and then, magically, after an hour it will be ok and I’ll get on with things. At least I can walk fully upright now!
- Exercising early in the morning. I’ve got into this ridiculous situation here where I somehow fully believe at 11 pm that I will get up and be at a yoga class feeling #strong at 7 am. I like yoga. I even love it. But I’m never going to feel like doing it or be my best flexible self at 7am. Even 8 am is a challenge. So I don’t go. The problem is that my gym (I’m Scottish and I still feel kind of pretentious saying that) has an app (of course it does) and if you book a class then don’t cancel it at least two hours beforehand, it online cancels you and you have to visit the gym and be shamed by someone in the admin team who is much fitter and healthier-looking than you will ever be until they agree to unlock the app again. So I’m now in this crazy situation where I’m having to wake at 4 am or 5 am to cancel a yoga class at 7am that I was never, ever going to go to. It is just stupid.
So I’m ready to embrace a year where there is no change. There are no packing boxes, new jobs or unfamiliar apps in my immediate future and that fills me with a deep sense of joy! 2025 will be about the new morphing into the normal and that’s exciting enough for me!
