Paint

Immediately on arrival in Denmark in 2019, we had to start looking for somewhere to live. We'd rented a summer house on a golf course at the coast but it was small, overpriced and with 3m high glass walls was constantly either slightly too cold or waaay too hot! It consisted of four white bedrooms, two white bathrooms and one white dining-living room.

We quickly drew up a shortlist of maybe a dozen houses within driving distance to Thomas's new job which were big enough not only to house the five of us but also my two older children whenever they visited. With most of the schools in the area being of a similar and reasonable quality, the most important criterion to me was space for them, otherwise it would be hard to feel like as close a family going forward.

After viewing a few, it began to strike me that no matter how different they might look on the outside, the inside was much of a muchness. Every room in every house we visited was white. Eventually we found one, the one we ended up buying as it happens, which had one of the 10+ rooms in a different colour (the TV room was pale green), but other than that it was a sea of white. Everywhere looked very clean and crisp, and quite beautiful but also quite foreign to us. Scottish homes tend to have coloured rooms - be that conventional cream, trendy grey, or feature walls in dark colours or fancy wallpapers. Very few houses in Scotland use white for anything other than maybe the bathroom or at a pinch the kitchen. So, although everywhere looked beautiful, it felt very alien.

Once we'd bought our house, the kids asked if they could have one coloured wall each and I agreed. So off we went to Bauhaus, our equivalent of B&Q. Up to the paint aisle we went looking for little tester pots and all the various shades, only to find every single pot was white! Now that was a surprise. There was literally not a single pot of coloured emulsion in the shop! You could get dark green or brown garden furniture paint but only white for indoors. That explained the houses we'd viewed I guess. I checked smaller DIY stores and they were the same. How odd!

I resolved to look next time I was in Germany while cursing Danes under my breath. It was fully six months later that I realised you can, at no extra cost, have any colour you like, you just have to have it mixed from a catalogue of colours. So, you shouldn't try decorating your Danish house before you can speak Danish as you need to know how to ask them to mix paint, talk through whether it is to be emulsion, wood paint or metal paint and then they throw their weird paint numbering system into the mix. Danish already has the hardest numbers in the world so why they need to number their paint is beyond me! They ask if you'd like your emulsion 5, 10, 15... all the way up to 30 or maybe it is even 50, I can't quite remember. This turns out to be their matt to gloss scale! 5 is matt, 30 is gloss. The higher the number you ask for, the shinier the paint. So, if you're crap at Danish numbers, you can only paint your rooms matt!

Once we'd painted a few rooms in different shades, Danes commented on how unusual and daring we were not to have only white, and when I painted the garden bench outside in dark green, I got funny looks again and several people commented on how odd garden furniture looks when it isn't white!

Collective mentality is an interesting thing!

A&E in Denmark

Since arriving in Denmark in 2019 I have tried the GP,  the out-of-hours GP surgery, I've had normal hospital appointments and even an operation or two, but have never needed to go to casualty... until yesterday.

I managed to nosedive off a ladder in my garden. Here's the full story, for what it's worth. 

In Scotland, I am used to the routine, given the number of kids I have. You fall off your ladder, you go straight to A&E, you go up to the triage desk and they ask you what the issue is. The triage nursing staff take your details and enter them into a computer and then you take a seat in a waiting room. Then, depending on whether it's Tuesday afternoon or Saturday night, you might wait anywhere between 2 and many, many hours, before you are called in for treatment. In the interim, you put up with drunks fighting each other, people bleeding in the waiting room and wailing, people screaming at staff that someone who came in after them has been taken before them, obviously not understanding the idea of triage. On a weekend night, police routinely bring people in handcuffed and bleeding, shouting abuse. It is never a dull spectacle. I figured Denmark would be similar, but I was wrong.

Thomas handed me the phone number for A&E, not 112 (the 999 equivalent), but the non-urgent emergency room. I rang up and was put through to the triage nurse, they took my health number and asked me all the same details I would have been asked at the desk in Scotland. They then checked their computer and gave me a time slot two hours later telling me in the meantime to sit with my leg elevated. 

On arrival I sat in a waiting room with just two other people. One with an obvious finger injury, the other with a twisted ankle. They were taken immediately through a door marked assessment and x-ray. Five minutes after my allotted time, I was called in and I was assessed, x-rayed and back out within 40 minutes of my allotted time. No drama, no waiting, nothing. It was entirely uneventful and very efficient.