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Updated: Jan 13

In retrospect, time often seems to go so slowly and those apocryphal youthful summers that seemed to last forever and were always sunny, were actually the same length as they are now and just as tedious. 


I used to live in Denmark and still have a number of very good friends over there. One of them is an English chap, whom I shall name Jeremy - not his real name, as they say in the press. Our friendship has always been very literary, as we both love books and we were aways swapping them and discussing our favourite writers on nights out in town before marriage, divorce and children caught up with us. Our reading habits were encouraged and fostered by the lovely manager of an international bookshop in Copenhagen. When you went in to browse, she would say in her perfect but slightly Norwegian accented English, "Ah Phil, good to see you. I have some books you should read..." and sure enough she would have found five or six titles she knew I would like and I would always leave the bookshop having spent much more than I intended. The same would happen with Jeremy.


We were never part of the ex-pat community, having both decided early on to go as native as possible. We both spoke fluent Danish and if anyone asked - which they did - whether we considered ourselves English or British, we'd reply 'European' just to muddy the water. Nevertheless, when we spoke about missing 'home' we discovered that we both haboured a kind of nostalgia for an England that neither of us had experienced.


We were both born in the '50s, he of definite working class Midlands stock and the first in his family to go to university in Swansea, while I came from a relatively middle class background, with an uncle who was a vicar, which brought with i certain familial expectations. Not that I was destined for the church, but there was a sense, largely inculcated by my domineering grandmother, that we were a bit better than others.


Jeremy was always good at school while I, though appearing clever enough in class, always suffered when tests or exams came around. Prior to just scraping through my 11 plus, the headmaster told my parents that I was intellectual rather ran academic. That pleased my mother no end, as being an intellectual was to her far more romantic than being a dusty academic. Scraping through yet again, I managed to get into what is now known as Manchester Metropolitan University but was then a Teacher's Training College.


But back to Jeremy and I as Englishmen abroad. At some point, we realised that the England we felt nostalgic about could never have existed for us, being largely influenced by the books we had read. It would probably have been a story set in the 1930s inhabited by posh girls in flowered dresses and dashing chaps with sports cars who had just come down from Oxford, who drank warm beer and played cricket on the green. In five years time they would be in the RAF or a good regiment and would be off to give Hitler a bloody nose.


That makes it all sound a bit Mills and Boon, although it was probably Evelyn Waugh, but perhaps, in addition to the books we read, it may have been the very fact that we were in a different country that caused all the literary cliches associated with 'home' to come alive for us.


I'm also a bit obsessed by the First World War. All the males of my grandparents family fought in it and two of my great-uncles lost their lives; one at one of the battles around Ypres and one on The Somme. One is commemorated on The Menin Gate in Ypres and the other on the massive red brick memorial at Thiepval designed by Edwin Lutyens. The immensely sad thing about this is that these are memorials to the missing, who could not be buried, meaning that their lives were probably snuffed out by high explosives, leaving only a name in an Army record book to be inscribed on a monument.


So, one February some years ago to coincide with a significant birthday, I decided to go and find Uncle Albert in Ypres. "What, on your own?" You might ask, ".... on this significant milestone in your life?" Well, yes. I had decided that I wasn't going to make any big deal of it, so I didn't actually tell anybody. My family knew of course, but they weren't going to blab, so I reasoned that as far as the rest of the world was concerned, I would just mysteriously disappear for a few days.


My journey began at Sandwich Station, which I reckoned hadn't changed much since 1916, when the platforms would have been crowded with troops bound for the front. Many of them would be ferried to France on the barges that were constructed at Port Richborough, just a short march down the road. I pictured the scene and wrote some notes, imagining myself as an officer (of course!) bound for France, although in my 21st century case, on the way to the Eurostar at St Pancras.


I rented a small car from Lille station and found my billet for the next few days, which was a cheapish but surprisingly pleasant art deco-inspired hotel on one of the roads out of the city towards Ypres. The next day after breakfast, I ventured out towards the 'front', as I referred to it in my notes. Ypres turned out to only be half an hours drive from Lille and I was surprised how many signs led to places I'd read about, Ploegsteert, Tournai (Tourcoing), Courtrai (Kortrijk), Zonnebeke Poelcapelle and Passendale - the infamous Passchendaele, where the front line trenches were completely obliterated by shell fire, leaving soldiers on both sides to fight and drown in the huge mud-filled shell holes that scattered the flat waterlogged plain.


I got out of the car on Passchendaele ridge, just past the crossroads memorialised in WW1 literature as Hellfire Corner. The road is slightly elevated, so you can see the landscape on both sides. On one side, the land is much lower and the water table considerably higher, so one could imagine how susceptible it would be to flooding. On the other, it sloped slightly upwards to the Tyne Cot memorial cemetery on the ridge that in 1917 formed part of the German lines, meaning that the British, Australian and Canadian troops fighting here would have been attacking uphill. As I stood on the ridge surveying the landscape, it began to snow - hard icy flakes whipping my face in the freezing wind as I tried to imagine not only surviving in the open in that kind of weather but having to fight in it. It's all different now and had the weather been more clement, the scene would have been quite bucolic, with dykes and small dairy farms scattered about the plain. A striking difference to what was happening in my head.


I returned to Ypres and after a beer in a small cafe just inside the walls of the town, I found Uncle Albert on the Menin Gate and bought a couple of books from Steve, a Canadian who owned an English language bookshop dedicated to World War One. Steve told me he was a photographer who had been commissioned by the Canadian government to take photographs of all the Canadian war graves. While he was working, he met a Belgian woman, fell in love and never went back.


Ypres is now quite a charming walled town that was completely destroyed during the war and was reconstructed as closely as possible to the original plans during the 1920s. And as far as I know, Steve is still there. Maybe one day I'll go back and visit him and say hello to Uncle Albert while I'm there.


One day I will write more about this visit, as it profoundly affected me and got me wondering why it is that my generation born in the 1950s still feel more of a pull from the cataclysmic conflict our grandfathers fought in rather than the one our fathers did. Is it because we're the last generation that had a direct contact with people who fought in it? Is it because it was the first proper technological war that brought advances not only in new ways of killing people but paradoxically, also in medicine, psychology and the role of women in society.



A while ago I sent my niece what I thought was one of the most amusing birthday cards I’ve seen in a long time. It was difficult to say whether it had been artificially manipulated, but the picture seemed to be one of those Victorian lithographs of a drawing room with an aspidistra on a table and antimacassars on the armchairs. On another chair, slightly out or place in such a middle class Victorian drawing room, sat a rather working class type of chap with a drooping moustache, dressed in working clothes and hobnail boots but with a small girl in crinolines and paper-curled ringlets, perched on his knee. The caption that caused me to snort with laughter in the middle of W.H. Smiths read; “I’m sorry love, we’re Northern and that’s all there is to it.”  You had to see it really, but I knew that this was the right card for The Flying Baby, as my niece was known in her early youth.

However, now, as a responsible employee at the Canary Wharf headquarters of one of the larger banks, I don’t think she would thank me for leaking this snippet of information.


And with no connection whatsoever, this brings me on to etiquette - something we Northerners are supposedly ignorant of, not knowing as we do, the difference between supper and dinner.

 

I thought I’d stepped a rung up the social ladder when I began calling the evening meal dinner – my sister still calls it tea – but I was reliably informed by a posh friend that this is now called supper - at least amongst those who know. Now, I lived abroad for a good number of years and a lot of things appear to have changed since I left. One of these seems to be the disappearance of dinner. In my Northern past, dinner used to be at what I now call lunchtime, tea was at five o’clock and supper was a glass of milk and a couple of chocolate Hobnobs at bedtime - if you were lucky. As I grew more sophisticated (I thought), dinner seemed to move up a social rung and be eaten at about seven. Tea had apparently followed the Ninth Legion and disappeared somewhere north of York.

 

The penny finally dropped this morning when I was reading one of Waitrose’s foodie mags and two foodies were discussing the question of dinner parties. One loved dinner parties but the other didn’t – although this didn’t stop the one who didn’t like them from giving them anyway. The one who did like them said ‘I have friends for supper, but I love giving dinner parties…’ It’s a good thing I began reading these magazines, I thought, otherwise I’d have been inviting friends round for a glass of milk and a Hobnob at six o’ clock. Then they got on to etiquette at these dinner parties and the one who didn’t like them confessed to the most awful social gaffe of conversing with the person on their right during the first course, when it suddenly occurred to them that they should have been conversing with the person on their left. This might actually have been the other way round, but it’s so unbelievably trite that I can’t even be bothered get the magazine and check. However, when I mentioned this to my knowledgeable friend, she just looked at me pityingly and said “Well, how would you know, you’ve been abroad”.

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When we were in Denmark a few years ago researching the Borderlands Project, we were encouraged to splash out (literally) one night at Schackenborg Slotskro, the posh ex-coaching inn in the picturesque South Jutland village of Møgeltønder (the correct pronunciation of which is almost hernia-inducing). 


The inn is associated with Schackenborg manor house, which until recently was the home of Prince Joachim of Denmark. Joachim and his brother Frederik, are the Danish Wills and Harry - they also married below the salt, which only makes them more popular with the Danes. As I'm writing this in 2025 and all this took place six years ago, Frederik has since become King, taking over from his mother Margrethe II, who retired gracefully and probably sensibly to make way for the younger generation - how very Danish. 


Anyway, on this particular night we arrived in a torrential downpour so intense we could barely see to the other side of the cobbled main street. Given the cultural status of the place, we were expecting to be welcomed with open arms by a classy Maitre 'd, but no chance. We stood in the entrance in soaked coats and had to find our way to the dining room, where there were a few diners - most of them over 70 - and no visible serving persons. Finally, after what seemed about half an hour, someone came and offered to take our coats and showed us to our table for two. This is where things began to get a bit weird. It was indeed a table for two because it had two sets of service, but it was stuck on the end of two more tables stretching to the wall, covered with white tablecloths. It felt as if we were marooned in the centre of the small dining room, at the end of what looked like a long, white catwalk. If Naomi Campbell had come leaping through the window and waltzed up and down a bit, I wouldn't have been surprised.


We were then left for about 10 minutes with no human contact; not even a small person to offer us a glass of water. Finally a very tall person came to ask if we would like some water. "And perhaps some wine?" I ventured in Danish, fearing that perhaps they had run out.

"I'll go and get the wine list," she muttered in English. We wondered why she hadn't just brought the thing when she came to ask if we were thirsty. But no, one thing at a time, as it transpired.

Five minutes later she returned with the wine list. "Would you like to see the menu?" She then enquired. I wanted to say, "Well, this is a fucking restaurant, so a menu would seem to be an obvious item" but desisted as I could see my wife looking sternly at me from behind her severely professional-looking glasses. "Yes, that would be lovely," I simpered instead.


Things got rapidly worse. The other half is a veggie and the menu, when it arrived, had no vegetarian options whatsoever. However, she does do fish when cornered, so this looked like the opportunity for both of us to go for what was announced on the menu card as 'Frowned collop with sour apple and Tarragon 'oil' ". This rather surprised me as the Danes are normally fluent English speakers and writers so this did not bode well. 'Collop' was obviously meant to be scollop, or scallop as it is properly spelled but why was it 'frowned'? Why did tarragon have a capital T and why was "oil" in citation marks? 

"We'll have the scollops," I said. 

The tall serving wench looked a little confusticated... "I'll just go and see," she said and disappeared. Just go and see what, we wondered - if the chef's poorly, perhaps? She returned, hands wringing, "I'm afraid the scollops are off tonight, we just haven't had time to take them off the menu." Great. The conversation then went something like this:

"Well, what other vegetarian options do you have?"

"I don't know." More hand-wringing.

"Does the chef know, then?"

"I'll go and ask."

My glorious significant other takes over, to save me from committing a murder.

"Herring, there must be herring, there's always herring in Denmark. I'll have marinated herring, if you have that." She said.

"I'll go and ask,"

FFS... this is supposedly a top-flight Danish culinary experience. They serve lunch; Danish lunch always includes marinated herring, so bring forth the herring.

Back she comes. "Yes, we have herring, would you like that?"

Phew. 

I chose cod with parsnip 'in its own fume' whatever that was, but that is insignificant because it's my other half's experience that is key here. Anyone who has had a proper Danish lunch knows that the marinated herring usually comes on a slice of rye bread with all sorts of other goodies and assorted greens piled on top. Yummy, as she might have said, except this wasn't. When it arrived, it was basically an entire herring curled up snugly in a bowl with a bit of cress on top and what was described as curry sauce. It actually tasted fine, it was a top-quality, very well marinated herring but it was the presentation that was dreadful. Whatsisface from Master Chef would have been rolling his eyes. As he would when her main course arrived too. "Panfried redfish with saffron risotto and rieslind foam" when it arrived turned out to be a massive oval plate with an enormous slab of browned-off red snapper plonked down indiscriminately in a puddle of risotto only remarkable as saffron because it was a bit yellow. What 'rieslind foam' was we never discovered because it wasn't even evident on the dish. What there was though was a pile of coarsely chopped white cabbage in some kind of creamy sauce which may have contained traces of 'rieslind' Everything was anaemic shades of cream. It did, however taste fine, which was I suppose, some consolation.


For the sake of argument, I should mention that my own experience wasn't quite as mind-numbing. The cod starter was decent enough, as was the teal (a ducky thing for those that are unsure about game) with foie gras, although it was a little chewy. The best bit of the meal was the wine: a crisp Alsace and a meaty Zinfandel, which, as we were driving, we were allowed to cork and take home.

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