The Year of Living Danishly by Helen Russell Page B

the equivalent of 12p or 20 cents towards our next shop. I am disproportionately excited by this.
    It’s not just Prius drivers, hemp-fans and hipsters who are passionate about the environment in Denmark. Being eco-friendly here is seen as a basic duty and something you do to be a part of Danish society. Inspired by the fervour of my neighbours, I go on a fact-finding mission and discover that Denmark was the first country in the world to establish an official environment ministry, back in 1971. Today, the Danish clean power industry is one of the most competitive in the world and the country gets 30 per cent of its electricity from wind. In 2013, Denmark won the World Wildlife Fund’s most prestigious award, Gift to the Earth, for inspiring leadership with the world’s most ambitious renewable energy and climate targets. It has also been voted the most climate-friendly country by the United Nations’ Climate Change Performance Index for the past two years. The Danish government aims to reduce CO2 emissions by 40 per cent by 2020 and the environment ministry has a collective goal for a ‘Denmark without waste’ by 2050 – when they hope that everything will be reused or recycled. At a time when most countries are reneging on their environmental promises, Danes are setting themselves tougher and tougher targets, and they’re on course to meet them.
    Impressed, I resolve to perform my civic recycling duties rigorously and with pride in future, and am keen to inform Messrs Beard & Beard of this when they call round a week later to check I’ve been putting my cans in the correct bin. They nod in acknowledgement of my environmental epiphany then shuffle off again as fast as they can.
    Other than this, no one speaks to us. If I was expecting the happiest country on earth to be welcoming, I was mistaken. I miss London. I miss noise. Instead of working to the sound of 747 engines whirring their way along the Heathrow flight path, or ear-piercing sirens speeding past to pick up London’s criminal not-so-elite, I now hear birdsong, tractors or, worse, nothing. The place is so still and silent that the soundtrack to my day is often the ringing of long-forgotten tinnitus, acquired during an adolescence spent at bad gigs. Our dog finally arrives from the UK but gets so spooked by the deer, hares and foxes currently inhabiting our garden that he immediately retreats to the laundry room. Here, he whimpers and can only be comforted by a full load on spin cycle. Then, once we’ve finally got him settled, we’re kept awake three nights running by owls .
    I miss my friends, and find that moaning about owls to them over FaceTime isn’t nearly so much fun as moaning to them about owls over wine. I was prepared for the fact that we’d be starting over. We’d convinced ourselves that this would be ‘liberating’, forcing us to try new things and meet new people and broadening our horizons. But this doesn’t seem quite so appealing when we find ourselves sitting at home, alone, again , wondering how to kick-start our Danish social life.
    â€˜If Denmark has a population the size of South London,’ I tell Lego Man, ‘and we reduce our catchment area to, say, a twenty-kilometre radius of where we live and narrow it down to people within a two-decade age bracket, the number of people we may actually like gets even smaller. In other words, if the friendship pond is already tiny, we’re not going to like all the pond life we meet.’
    â€˜Right,’ says Lego Man, looking unsure. I wait for him to counter this and tell me that everything’s going to be all right. But he doesn’t. Instead he says: ‘You should also bear in mind that they might not like us . They might have enough friends already, like we did back home.’ Great. Now I feel much better…
    â€˜It’ll be OK,’ Lego Man says eventually, shuffling closer towards me on the