According to various sources, Copenhagen is the happiest place on Earth. This, of course, is in direct contradiction to the publicity put out by the good people of the Disney corporation, who would have you believe that they are the owners and operators of that joy-drenched piece of real estate. Clearly there was something to investigate and resolve there, and so we set out with a crack team which included a number of hard-living German care professionals, a venerable former member of the Church of England clergy, and a pretend internet film critic.

After some discussion we decided to make our enquiries in Copenhagen rather than California, given the group's preference for beer and pastry over jetlag and people in animal costumes. I had to do some emergency shopping in Copenhagen Airport a few years back following an in-flight wardrobe malfunction and the place remains one of the more attractive transport hubs of my experience – one major airport always puts me in mind of a bus station which has been mysteriously colonised by a lot of high-end shops.

As is usual, Copenhagen Airport has a go at being a shop window for the country and the city, a bit like Heathrow. While London's airport does this via pictures of beefeaters, pearly queens and human statues in welcoming poses, Copenhagen has plumped for a display of benches. These start in the baggage reclaim area and show the Danish virtues of solidity and utility, although I'm not sure I would want to spend more than a few minutes on one of them. Thankfully the industry of the Danish baggage-handlers meant this was not necessary.

Off to the taxis where we were able to secure a ride to the hotel fairly quickly, although given it was lashing down, possibly not quickly enough. Visibility was minimal and so while the rest of the party grappled with their seatbelts in the confined space of the rear seats I took a moment to interrogate our driver as to the best places to visit in the city.

'Castle very good, you will like that. About two kilometres away,' he suggested.

'How about the city hall?'

'Ah yes, also very beautiful. This is two kilometres away.'

'So are they close to each other, then?'

'No, I think they are. . . ' a pause for thought '. . . I think about two kilometres apart.'

'Ah, okay. . . . Tivoli Gardens?'

'Oh yes! So beautiful.'

'Two kilometres away?'

'Yes, very good. But shut.'

It turned out it was the Tivoli Gardens which inspired Walter Elias D to create his own similar realm of pleasure, albeit with more giant anthropomorphic rodents, so that's one mystery solved. It was swiftly replaced by the question of just how it is that – if the cabbie is to be believed – any two given points in Copenhagen are inevitably two kilometres apart. Possibly either Euclid or Escher was involved when the city was in the planning stages.

After a ride of about two kilometres from the airport we reached our accommodation, the charming Kong Arthur Hotel, which of course leads one to ponder exactly what the Danish title for King Kong is. It actually resembled a group of four or five smaller hotels and restaurants which have come together to form a colonial super-organism, which in this case is a rather bigger hotel with a complicated floorplan and a lot of courtyards. But the welcome was very hospitable and the place had a sense of humour about it I found endearing, as displayed by some of the trinkets lying around our room.

After a good night's sleep and a bracing Nordic buffet we set off to explore the city, which is full of good solid townhouses in roughly the same architectural style and also Danish people on bicycles (the city is on track to be carbon neutral by the end of 2025). We were struck by the stoicism and lust for life of even the most apparently sedentary citizens who we saw during our peregrinations.

I was particularly keen to visit the statue of the Small Fish Girl, as my pirated guidebook called the city's most famous resident, as I hoped a close examination might reveal her actual ethnicity and thus settle a lot of recent arguments. Sadly, when we reached what seemed like a likely prospect it looked like the topically-minded Danes had updated the statue already, the new version portraying the Little Mermaid taking a symbolic beating at the hands of small-minded internet boneheads.

At least the City Hall of Copenhagen was only two kilometres away, and after a quick pop inside to enjoy the statue of Niels Bohr (definitely Caucasian but not much like Ken Branagh) and get married, we moved on to get more of a sense of the city and its people. The Copenhageners are a diverse and friendly bunch, but I suspect a statute has been passed outlawing spontaneous performances of 'Wonderful Wonderful Copenhagen', presumably because your average Danish metropolitan doesn't like the implication they're a salty old queen of the sea any more than you or I would. Everyone seems to speak at least three languages, which was just as well as I learned all my Danish from episodes of The Bridge and you can only say 'Her corpse has been dismembered' in so many social situations before it gets awkward. Written Danish sometimes looks a bit like drunken Cockney which has been phonetically transcribed, which I didn't expect.

After an exciting meal at a traditional Danish tapas restaurant I called it a night and left the German care-workers to misbehave in the hotel bar. The next morning saw another Nordic buffet, replete with treats such as apple butter and other dishes you would usually only expect to find in a country where strict rationing conditions were in place.

Some wandering about led to us discovering some authentic Viking post-boxes and the Danish National Gallery, only two kilometres from our hotel, which at the time of our visit had been sponsored by an Italian pizza chain from the looks of things. Alas we had no time to look inside as an executive decision had been made to spend the day going round and round on an open-topped tourist bus. As it was still technically winter, however, the decision had been made to close up the open top of the open-topped bus, thus transforming it into what is technically known as a bus, and occasioning plenty of neck-craning and subsequent muscle cramps in order to see some of the more awkwardly-positioned sights.

Copenhagen is a city which can't help but lead you to ask questions as you roam its streets – have the Danes really hit upon the secret of happiness? Was that ex-Queen Margrethe who just nearly ran me over? Why doesn't she get a bell for that bike? And, most urgently and profoundly, is that guy in the advert the one who was diddling himself in the bathtub in Saltburn?

Our time in Copenhagen was all too quickly drawing to a close, and – more worryingly – the German care-workers and the retired C of E vicar were clearly being a bad influence on one another. We went out for one last meal to celebrate our time in the city, and were reminded again just why Copenhagen has acquired its reputation for innovative, quality cuisine, and also staggeringly expensive restaurants. But the two-kilometre walk back to the Hotel Kong Arthur was ultimately a happy and contented one. We had seen just enough of Copenhagen to be fascinated, but the city had retained enough of her mystique to make us want to return to her. What a salty old queen of the sea she truly is.

Awix

18.03.24 Front Page

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