.
.
The final morning of a holiday is mostly about luggage. We packed, repacked, checked the weight of the bags, moved things from one case to another and eventually established that we could get ourselves and everything we had accumulated over the past ten days back to Britain without having to wear six layers of clothing onto the aircraft. Antonio and Lewis, our two travelling bears, also had to be consigned to their own travelling suitcases, which felt like the clearest possible sign that the holiday really was coming to an end.
With that achieved, we went out for coffee and a bun at a little café close to the hotel. Sitting outside was very pleasant once we had successfully negotiated the Copenhagen morning cycle traffic. We have become quite accustomed to bicycles during our time here, but Copenhagen commuters seem to operate according to a special set of rules. They ride fast, with absolute purpose, and appear to regard pedestrians, cars and occasionally other cyclists merely as complications in the route ahead.
Crossing a cycle lane requires considerably more concentration than crossing many of the roads, so we were amused to come across a group of primary school children in high-visibility tabards undergoing off-road cycle training. Presumably they were being taught the essential Copenhagen skills of ignoring all known road rules, travelling as fast as humanly possible and regarding anyone foolish enough to step into a cycle lane as entirely responsible for what happened next.
Back at the hotel we were collected by my old Scout friend Troels Forchhammer. Troels is a real expert in Scout educational methods and someone with whom I have enjoyed exchanging ideas, corresponding and periodically catching up in person over many, many years. One of the great pleasures of international Scouting is that friendships can survive long gaps between meetings remarkably easily. You meet again and simply carry on.
Troels drove Mark and me out through the Copenhagen suburbs and into the countryside to one of his favourite places, Bryggeri Skovlyst, a restaurant and brewery tucked among the trees. It was exactly the right place for a final Scandinavian lunch: relaxed, unhurried and resolutely local.
We all chose the large lunch selection, which arrived as a succession of small dishes: egg and hand-peeled shrimp with herb mayonnaise; seasonal flatfish with remoulade and lemon; cold-smoked salmon with seafood salad; potato with mayonnaise, onion and bacon; chicken salad with curry, baked celery and apple; and rillette of wild boar flavoured with apple and rosemary.
This was not a lunch designed for people in a hurry, which was fortunate because none of us was. We lingered over it, talking about careers and how they evolve, Danish and British Scouting, mutual friends, educational ideas and experiences accumulated over rather a lot of years. Lunch eventually ended, helped along by coffee and something chocolatey which none of us particularly needed but which would have been foolish to refuse.
Troels then asked whether there was anything in Copenhagen we had somehow failed to see. There was one fairly obvious omission: the Little Mermaid. Having spent yesterday cheerfully accepting that we were not on a school tour and didn’t need to tick off every Copenhagen landmark, today we went to tick off Copenhagen’s most famous landmark.
She is, as everyone warns you, little. Created by sculptor Edvard Eriksen and unveiled in 1913, the bronze figure was inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s story and commissioned by Carl Jacobsen of the Carlsberg brewing family after he saw a ballet based on the tale. She sits on her rock at the edge of the harbour, looking out across the water, and has somehow become one of those images inseparable from its city.
I had half expected to be underwhelmed, but actually I rather liked her. Perhaps it helped that the day was grey and the harbour slightly moody rather than sparkling beneath a perfect tourist-brochure sky. She looked small, solitary and rather wistful, which is presumably exactly the point.
We wandered a little further around the area with Troels. Nearby is the old Kastellet citadel, one of the best-preserved star fortresses in northern Europe, its green ramparts now forming a wonderfully peaceful place to walk. Inside stands a handsome old windmill, a reminder that this was once a functioning military community which needed to be able to produce its own flour if the city came under siege. Troels reminded me more than once, with understandable Danish relish, that the last people to besiege Copenhagen were the British.
From the waterfront we could also see a rather different collection of Danish symbols. The royal yacht Dannebrog lay across the water, its elegant white hull and yellow funnel instantly distinctive, while nearby were the preserved warship Peder Skram and a submarine, with the modern city rising behind them. Copenhagen does rather enjoy putting several centuries into the same view.
Troels then very kindly drove us all the way to the airport, so I am now sitting at Copenhagen Airport writing the final blog of the holiday while Mark reminds me of things I have inevitably forgotten. And there has been quite a lot to remember.
We arrived here on my birthday and headed to Dragør, where we ate beside the harbour and looked out towards the Øresund Bridge. The following morning we collected our grey and reassuringly Teutonic Audi and drove across that bridge into Sweden, with Mark performing the important role of reminding me which side of the road I was supposed to be on.
Since then there have been castles and coastlines, fishing villages and forests, cities and tiny communities. We climbed the lighthouse at Smygehuk and stood among the great stones of Ales Stenar; watched birds from a hide in the rain; admired gossip mirrors in Kivik; passed the Absolut distillery at Åhus; and returned to the edge of the site of the 2011 World Scout Jamboree at Rinkaby before travelling on to Karlskrona.
There was a particularly special day with Göran at Sandgärdet, eating kroppkakor made in the kitchen which had belonged to his grandfather, walking around the village and church and swimming in the lake, before later meeting Lin in Västervik. There was ice cream at Smultronstället, where restraint was not particularly evident, and then Stockholm.
Stockholm gave us trams and islands, the ABBA Museum, where dignity was temporarily suspended, and a wonderful birthday weekend for Mark. There were old friends, new friends, a party at Johan’s house complete with home-brewed beer and live music, and a day discovering the city with Migo. Stockholm somehow managed to feel both unmistakably like a capital and remarkably calm.
Then there was Trosa, our magnificently eccentric room at Bomans and the beautiful Stendörren nature reserve, where the boat trip we had originally imagined was replaced by walking through the woods and across the little suspension bridges. I did some amateur foraging for lingonberries; Mark, as he so often does, found people to talk to. We had a fascinating evening with Sven Otto and one final Swedish dinner overlooking the water.
Our journey back south brought an unexpected circle closing in Helsingborg, where I had first visited for the European Scout Conference in 1992. Göran had been on the planning committee then; more than three decades later he had just been one of the people who made this trip so special. Life occasionally draws rather satisfying lines between its dots.
Then it was back across the bridge to Copenhagen: excellent Vietnamese pho on our first evening, Rosenborg, the Round Tower, an heroic lunch at Schønnemann, Nyhavn, Amalienborg and the great dome of the Marble Church. We stumbled across freshers taking over the King’s Garden, wandered through food markets and then, having spent much of the day behaving like reasonably cultured adults, went to Tivoli and conclusively demonstrated that we are actually very large teenagers.
If we were to reduce the holiday to statistics — some more scientifically robust than others — we have managed two countries, eight different places to sleep in seven different locations, two birthdays, two crossings of the Øresund Bridge, around a thousand miles in our little grey Audi, one lake swim, one lighthouse climbed, one ancient stone ship, one royal yacht, one submarine, one Little Mermaid and comfortably more than 100,000 steps between us.
There have also been countless castles and palaces, several churches, one World Scout Jamboree site, three varieties of herring at a single sitting, two completely ridiculous ice creams, an unknowable quantity of coffee and enough cinnamon and cardamom buns to make accurate record-keeping inadvisable. We discovered fairly early that lunch could be dispensed with if there was a sufficiently good cake available somewhere around three o’clock. A surprising proportion of those 100,000 steps were probably taken in pursuit of food.
But sitting here with Mark trying to decide what the highlights were, it isn’t really the statistics — or even the sights — that come to mind. It is people and moments: Göran in his grandfather’s kitchen; Mark chatting to complete strangers at a country church while they investigated woodworm in the bell tower; friends gathered for his birthday in Stockholm; standing beside a lake; eating cakes somewhere we hadn’t planned to stop; driving through landscapes we hadn’t seen before; and meeting Troels again today and spending several hours talking as though the intervening years hadn’t happened.
That, I think, is why this has felt like much more than a road trip. We have eaten extremely well, laughed a great deal, seen some beautiful places and been reminded again of the extraordinary way in which friendships made through Scouting decades ago continue to weave themselves through our lives.
It has also confirmed something about the way we like to travel. You need enough of a plan to know roughly where you are going, but not so much of one that you fail to notice what happens on the way. Some of the best parts of these ten days were planned months ago; others happened because somewhere was closed, the weather changed, a boat wasn’t running, somebody suggested something, or we simply saw a sign and wondered what was down that road.
In a little while we will board the flight home. Tomorrow there will be washing, unpacking and the return to normal life. Blenheim will presumably want an explanation for our prolonged absence, and there is every possibility that he has left something dead somewhere in the house to welcome us back.
For the moment, though, we are still on holiday. Mark is beside me, Antonio and Lewis are safely packed away, our bags are, importantly, within the weight limit, and we have ten days of photographs to sort through and rather more memories than can sensibly fit into a blog.
It has been wonderful.
