THERE IS A LOVELY COUNTRY [21]

A “Danish moment” is upon us. Last weekend, I bought a book titled “How To Be Danish,” from a bookshop that had a table laden with books about Danish and Scandinavian culture, all vying to be Christmas presents. Why Denmark, and why now?

Where we once had “Feng Shui,” we now have “hygge,” a term meant to describe a particularly Danish brand of homeliness and conviviality. It is a feeling already known as “Germütlichkeit” in German, but Danes usually swap their translation “gemytlig,” for their word for “snug,” as in being hygge as a bygge in a rygge. (However, “hygge” is pronounced “hoo-guh,” so that joke doesn’t work.)

In essence, hygge is a year-round version of that relaxed feeling everyone has between Christmas and New Year, meeting up with family, enjoying good food and conversation in the glow of a candlelight, wearing a woolly jumper, drinking mulled wine, relaxing by a fireplace, away from the cold – lots of blankets, candles and food are involved. Step into a branch of Tiger, which is being renamed to the original “Flying Tiger Copenhagen,” and all your hygge needs will be met.

What I realise is, in the UK, we have no time for this during the rest of the year. That the Danes have this as part of their everyday lives goes some way to explaining why the sinister-sounding Happiness Research Institute recently reported that Danes are the happiest people in the world.

Hygge may work for Denmark, but Denmark is a different society to the UK, with its own solutions. Social mobility is not an aspiration, but an (unofficial) high minimum wage means it is not really a thing. It has among the highest tax rates in the world, but numerous, and generous state benefits, such as student grants, mean people are more likely to see what they pay for. Ostentatiousness is not part of the Danish character, and there is a smaller wealth gap than in most countries. In Denmark, your lifestyle is more likely to be shared, and more likely to be given a single name.

Having seen, when I picked up my copy of “How to Be Danish,” books with titles like “Hygge: The Danish Art of Happiness,” and “The Little Book of Hygge: How to Bring Danish Cosiness Into Your Life,” these Christmas stocking fillers feel less like guides to how others live their lives differently, and more like self-help books describing how others live better lives than you.

It reminded me of the 1996 TV ad for Ikea, imploring the British public to “Chuck Out the Chintz,” changing tastes more quickly than Sir Terence Conran managed with Habitat. That chintz itself was imported from India in the 17^th century is more an indicator of how British culture absorbs influences from other cultures so easily, and so often. Ikea likes to sell us a lifestyle but, for some, it is also somewhere else to go when you are bored with Argos.

Perhaps that is what we should do – take the bits that work, then move on. We watched “The Killing,” “The Bridge” and “Borgen,” and proceeded to make “Broadchurch” and “Top of the Lake.” We like what we like, then make our own version, like we’ll do with hygge.

SOMEONE LEFT THE CAKE OUT IN THE RAIN [18]

I have previously written here about how the fabric of the country will unravel with the threat of no more cake, because few other places would even consider it. However, this may help me to determine why so many people became worked up this week by the prospect of a television programme simply moving from one channel to another.

The facts of the story, helped by my never having watched it, are that “The Great British Bake Off,” a televised baking contest, will move from BBC One to Channel 4 for its next three series. This is because the company that made it for the BBC, Love Productions, itself seventy per cent owned by Sky, was offered more money by Channel 4 - at £25 million per series, they offered twice what the BBC were willing to commit, and four times its existing rate. With the deal completed without the input of its stars, its presenters will not be moving, and a question mark hangs over the judges, meaning Channel 4 may have bought the most expensive tent on record.

This is a business deal, plain and simple, over the biggest programme on TV, between two companies that rely on both ratings and revenue – Love Productions got first from the BBC, but not enough of the second anymore, so they went elsewhere. It has also happened often enough with imported shows – the fees Channel 5 agreed for “Neighbours” almost pay for the show to be made in the first place.   

The clue to the anger among viewers was the widely-reported but poorly-written petition hosted by the site 38dregrees.org, which talks about the show being a British institution, just like the BBC, and an escape from the commercial breaks that will ruin it when it moves to Channel 4. The show also, apparently, recognises diversity, and sets the tone for the country, and anything that meddles with this should be resisted.

Basically, the petition requested the status quo to be upheld. It was not aimed at Channel 4 or Love Productions, for the deal they made, or even at the BBC, for refusing to pay more than they did for “The Voice” before that show moved to ITV. It didn’t ask any of them to reverse any decision they made, and it doesn’t tell them what will happen if their request is ignored. There wasn’t any even any grumblings over art, or culture, having a price in a marketplace, like bread or, well, cake. This petition came across as a button to click that said, “I don’t like it either, but I’ll probably get used to it.”

If anyone really wanted to do something, they should develop a new idea for a TV programme – with sewing and pottery already taken - take it to a company, and see if the BBC wants it as a replacement – “The Great British Bake Off” originally ended up on BBC Two, in 2010, after many other channels rejected it. If it is accepted, and it becomes successful, you can then decide whether to go with the prestige, or the cash.

MY PINK HALF OF THE DRAINPIPE [14]

Here is all I knew about semi-detached houses: I live in one; they are a quintessentially British way to build a place to live; and they are less desirable than a detached house, but more than a terraced house or flat. The last of these made me wonder what kind of question "semis" are trying to solve, and why the answer means they make up about a third of all the housing stock in the UK.

The desirability factor can be seen on the map of any town, from as early as the nineteenth century – semis became a compromise between the rows of terraces found in the centre, and the larger detached houses found on the outskirts, where land was cheaper. This distinction has been muddied due to the spread of new semi-filled suburbs and estates, and the houses themselves being built at a lower cost, or lower standard. 

This is where I lose the point on why we build semis. If you look at one of the most important early examples, the Grade II-listed 3-5 Porchester Terrace, London W2, it is designed to look like a substantial detached house, with a colonnade topped with Grecian urns masking the front doors placed on opposite sides. The designer, John Claudius Loudon, better known as a landscape gardener, wanted the houses to appear as one, giving a sense of dignity to both, rather than each simply being a mirror image of the other.

The semi my mother grew up in, a simpler, more mass-produced post-war design, did keep the front doors on opposite sides, but this was already rare enough to look quite strange, and it annoys me to see how a later occupier has since moved its entrances around to the front, matching what others did to theirs in the same road. But, as extensions, white UPVC windows and loft windows have also been added through the road, the original look was lost long ago.

Regardless of how they now look, semis most adequately fill the need to cost-effectively build a house where someone would actually want to live. They came with a desire to make the area they were found better, giving rise to both front and back gardens, bringing running water inside the house, model towns like Port Sunlight and Bournville, the Garden Cities, cul-de-sacs, building societies, and the mortgage. The semi remains the British middle-class dream, even if you don’t want to think in those terms.

…and yet, semis also exist in across Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, Canada and even the United States – what was their thinking? All I know is, when singing “Santa Baby,” Eartha Kitt (or, if you like, Kylie Minogue) wanted Santa to “fill my stocking with a duplex and [cheques],” they could have set their sights a little higher than just a semi-detached house.

JUST A YOUNG DON, NO PLATE FULL OF PASTA [10]

Whenever I cook dinner, I prefer the same meal – salmon in a sweet chilli marinade, baby potatoes, kale, tomato, cucumber, peppers stuffed with feta cheese, and pickled beetroot. It is a refreshing dish with lots of taste, satisfying my unchecked theory that a meal becomes healthier when you see more colours on the plate.

Despite the British ingredients, my dinner is not a standard British dish. As a country, we like our full English breakfasts, steak and chips, tikka masalas and so on, but our dishes are not seen as the healthiest, and our palates are not seen as the widest, so trying something else means turning away from that part of our national identity.

This is not a plea to change what you eat for the good of us all, as I am not the sort of person that would say that. However, others have tried.

To make Italy a more self-sufficient country, the dictator Benito Mussolini raised the costs of importing grain in order to wean his people off pasta, and onto rice. This act chimed with an avant-garde art movement, whose designs on the Italian diet ingratiated themselves with Mussolini, keeping them in business while crackdowns on other movements were taking hold across Europe.

The Futurist movement, founded in 1909 by chief “aeropainter” Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, took inspiration from the modernity and industry that was cutting into the world – cities, planes, cars, speed, technology, violence. They took in all forms of art, and influenced the Art Deco, Surrealist and Dadaist movements. In Britain, Futurist influence is seen in the Vorticists, whose emphasis on bold lines and movement inspired the dazzle-painted ships of the First World War.

The futurists had no place for pasta. For them, it was a heavy food, an addiction to nostalgia and tradition, holding the Italian people back. Marinetti went as far as to advocate sustenance coming from pills, freeing food to be redesigned as an art form, to excite and re-arrange the senses. However, some Futurist dishes seemed to forget the concept of taste:

* “Chicken Fiat” involved a chicken being roasted with a handful of ball bearings inside it – once the steel flavour was absorbed, it was served with a garnish of whipped cream.

* A “Declaration of Love Dinner,” with a starter of antipasto that is to be admired, but not eaten – “she” will then be invited to look at her reflection in the plate of the next course.

* A “Heroic Winter Dinner,” designed for pilots as a preparation for entering combat, one course of which involved perfectly-cut cubes of raw beef, which had an electric current run through them before being soaked in rum, cognac and vermouth for twenty-four hours; they are then served on a bed of red pepper, black pepper and snow, with each cube chewed for exactly one minute, blowing on a trumpet between cubes.

* “Diabolical Roses” – a red rose, battered and deep-fried.

* “Elasticake,” a ball of puff pastry filled with red zabaglione and a stick of liquorice, with a lid made from half a prune.

These dishes speak for themselves – they are the sort of thing you may try once, just to say you tried. There is a whole book of them, published by Marinetti in 1932, and probably one of the funniest Christmas presents I have ever received.

While the bizarre choice of ingredients brings Heston Blumenthal to mind, his fusion of foods is in the interest of creating new tastes, while the Futurists were not really chefs, their dishes rejected outright by the Italian people. Perhaps, the lesson to be learned is not to play with your food, and don’t be fascistic about it either.

EU-A-GO-GO [3]

Thirteen days from now, we will have discovered our destiny, as the referendum on whether the United Kingdom should stay in the European Union has taken on more meaning than was ever intended. While the original 1975 referendum on the UK’s membership of the “Common Market” was more centred on the price of food, with its talk of butter mountains and wine lakes, this vote has blown past concern over the economy, and even over migration, becoming a moment when we are expected to decide what sort of country we want to live in... at least, that is how it seems to me.

Last Monday, I took delivery of my postal vote, which was completed and sent away the following day. While I am in the seemingly enviable position of no longer having to listen to the slanging match being played out in our 24-hour news cycle, having heard enough to decide which way to vote, I am experiencing as much anxiety over the result as I did when Scotland voted on independence in 2014.

I didn’t have a vote for that one but, if Scotland had voted to leave the UK, I would surely have had a migraine, as I consider myself more to be British than English, and taking Scotland out of the equation would be like putting your hand through a spider’s web of cultural identity built up over centuries. Cultural identity is why I also consider myself to be European, but this is more a way of saying “not American,” in that we just don’t think or do things in the same way.

However, Britain is often seen as “in Europe, but not run by Europe,” taking a phrase used by then Conservative Party leader William Hague at the 2001 General Election. While the UK had originally joined the European Economic Community, and had a referendum on that, it has not yet had a referendum over the change into the European Union, created by the Maastricht Treaty in 1992. The referendum we are having now is the culmination of over twenty years of feeling that we are dealing with more than we have signed up for – it is not a case of whether you agree with laws that the EU has set, it is whether we should be accepting them at all.

This is where the issue of British national identity has been used to colour the debate – that we can only properly exercise that identity if we have full control over our own affairs. The growth of the United Kingdom Independence Party seen in the last ten years has come from turning it from a one-issue group, grown from the original Anti-Federalist League that opposed signing the Maastricht Treaty. However, in becoming a right-wing populist party, in opposition to the main three parties, meant that voting for UKIP to leave the EU means you have to subscribe to their other policies too, and the ideology that formed them, which would be difficult for some. Would this also mean that, if we voted to stay in the EU, would a UKIP win in a general election undo that decision?

The wanting to have a simple non-partisan vote on EU membership can be traced back to the Referendum Party of 1994-97, which shared UKIP’s Euroscepticism, but only existed to put the issue to a democratic vote – if it was, the party would disband. In the 1997 General Election, the Referendum Party did not contest seats where the candidate most likely to win had wanted the same thing as they did, but wound up folding after its leader died. With the Conservative Party back in power by themselves from 2015, voted in on the promise of a referendum before the end of 2017, the argument over having a vote was now decided.

In that case, why are we having the referendum in 2016? Is it because of the ongoing migration issue, or the increased clamour of the public and politicians to have the vote, or is it David Cameron, who had resisted the calls for the vote, but changed his mind in 2013, simply wants the matter dealt with once and for all? The answer is most likely all of these, plus any others you can think of.

Because so many people have wanted this referendum, the debate is almost perfunctory, as the ramifications of leaving or staying in the EU is only informed guesswork. We have no idea of how the rest of the world will really react to the final decision, and there is no option of maintaining the status quo either.

This feels very much like a referendum on the sort of country we see ourselves to be, as how we want to be governed is only a part of that. All I hope is this – that the final decision of the people is respected, and that it is enacted in the interests of everyone.