Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
- navy blue jump suits with lots of zips and velcro pockets and loops holding torches and notebooks and
portable telephones and, for all I know, grappling hooks and rocket launchers. They looked as if between
them they could handle any contingency, from outbreaks of Lassa fever to disarming a nuclear submarine.
And the thing is, this was probably the biggest thing they would have to deal with all evening. The
Danes are almost absurdly law-abiding. The most virulent crime in the country is bike theft. In 1982, a year
for which I just happen to have the facts at my fingertips, there were six murders in Copenhagen, compared
with 205 in Amsterdam, a city of similar size, and 1,688 in New York. The city is so safe that Queen
Margarethe used to walk from Amalienborg Palace to the shops every morning to buy flowers and
vegetables just like a normal citizen. I once asked a Dane who guarded her in such circumstances, and he
looked at me with surprise and replied, 'Why, we all do,' which I thought was rather sweet.
The police officers helped the boy to his feet and led him to the patrol car. The small crowd dispersed,
but I found myself following them, almost involuntarily. I don't know why I was so fascinated, except that I had
never seen such gentle police. At the patrol car, I said in English to the female officer, 'Excuse me, what will
you do with the boy?'
'We'll take him home,' she said simply, then raised her eyebrows a fraction and added: 'I think he
needs his bed.'
I was impressed. I couldn't help thinking of the time I was stopped by police in America, made to stand
with my arms and legs spread against a wall and frisked, then taken to a police station and booked
because of an unpaid parking ticket. I was about seventeen myself at the time. God knows what they would
have done to me if they had found me in a drugged stupor on a city bench. I suppose I'd be getting out of jail
about now. 'Will he be in trouble for this?' I asked.
'With his father, I think so, yes. But not with us. We are all young and crazy sometimes, you know?
Good-night. Enjoy your stay in Copenhagen.'
'Good-night,' I said, and with the deepest admiration watched them go.
In the morning I felt like going to some museums. Copenhagen has splendid museums, which are
strangely neglected, even by the Danes. I went first to the immense National Museum, opposite
Christiansborg Palace, and had it more or less to myself. National museums, especially in small countries,
are often feeble affairs - department-store mannequins dressed in sixteenth-century peasant costumes and
a display case containing six Roman coins found in somebody's back garden. But the Danish National
Museum is both vast and richly endowed, and I spent a morning happily wandering through its miles of
echoing rooms.
Afterwards I went to the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. Some museums have great treasures but are dull
buildings and some have dull treasures but are great buildings, but the Glyptotek succeeds on both counts.
It has an outstanding collection of Roman statuary and some of the finest Impressionist paintings to be seen
anywhere, but the building itself is a joy - light, airy, impeccably decorated, with a warm and tranquil palm
court full of gently dozing old people. (So that's where they put them!)
But the best museum of all I saved for last - the Hirschsprung Collection in stre Anlaeg Park.
Everything about it is wonderful. It's a pleasant and gentle stroll from the city centre and stre Anlaeg is the
best park in the city, in my experience (which is short but in this case attentive), for seeing secretaries
sunning their breasts, but even without these huge and novel inducements it is worth seeking out because it
is such a terrific and little-visited museum. It contains 884 paintings, assembled over forty years by one
man, almost all of them from the nineteenth-century Skagen school of Danish painting, and all packed
densely into twenty or so mostly small rooms. The paintings are all concerned with simple themes - summer
landscapes, friends enjoying a casual dinner, a view of the sea from an open window, a woman at a sink -
but the effect is simply enchanting, and you come away feeling as if you have spent the afternoon in some
kind of marvellous and refreshing ionizer.
Afterwards, my spirits lifted, I had a long, happy walk through the surrounding park, moving methodically
from one sunbathing blonde to another, enquiring if they needed any assistance with their suntan lotion.
Actually, that's not true. It wasn't warm enough for sunbathing and in any case it was four in the afternoon
and all the secretaries in Copenhagen were tucked away in their dark offices, their lovely breasts bagged
away for at least another day, so I just walked around the park and imagined.
