As I sit here in my Sarah Lund Fair Isle sweater, polishing my boxed sets of Borgen and nibbling on a small piece of herring, it briefly occurs to me that perhaps I too have fallen victim to the prevailing mania for all things Scandinavian. Just about the only person who’s stayed resistant, it seems, is Michael Booth, the author of this book.
At home in Copenhagen — he’s married to a Dane — watching the incessant drizzle falling through the perpetual twilight, Booth begins to think he’s losing his mind. How come every survey ever commissioned into human happiness puts the Scandinavians at the top of the list?, he wonders. It doesn’t make sense — especially not when all the Scandinavians Booth meets are frosty, charmless and even more emotionally constipated than the British.
And that’s not all. Their food is filthy and their telly — with certain notable exceptions — rubbish. Even the Scandinavians themselves seem baffled by their alleged contentment. ‘We are all so boring and stiff,’ one Swede tells him, not without a tiny glimmer of pride.
In an attempt to plum the mysteries of the ‘Nordic miracle’, Booth sets off on a grand tour of the region. It soon becomes clear that anyone who thinks that happiness has anything to do with hard work is hopelessly wide of the mark. The Danes turn out to be astonishingly lazy, with over 20 per cent of the population doing no work at all. As for the others, they do work, but in a very desultory way, knocking off every day at 4 p.m. and vanishing from their desks en masse on Fridays on the stroke of one o’clock.
The reason so many Danes can get away with not working, of course, is because the rest of them pay so much tax.
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