Flying the flag

In Denmark, flags are everywhere, and yet they rarely carry any hint of tension. The red and white Dannebrog waves from flagpoles in more than half of all gardens, decorates birthday tables, and appears on cakes, cards, and wrapping paper. It is part of family celebrations, community gatherings, and everyday life. A small paper flag might sit proudly beside a plate of open sandwiches at a confirmation lunch, or a neat row of them might line the path to a summerhouse where friends are gathering to celebrate a birthday. The Danish flag is part of the landscape. It is not reserved for official events or political statements. It belongs to everyone.

What strikes many newcomers, myself included, is how natural and unselfconscious this relationship with the flag feels. It is woven into ordinary life, and its presence suggests warmth and shared identity rather than nationalism. In Denmark, to put out a flag is to say, “something happy is happening here.” It signals inclusion, not exclusion.

When I first moved here, I found this remarkable. In Britain, the sight of a flag was already beginning to feel complicated and this summer it has exploded onto the scene is a very negative way. The Union Jack has had its own baggage ever since Brexit and even the Scottish Independence Referendum, but it is the flag of St George, the red cross on white, that has become particularly charged in recent times. For many English people, I imagine it no longer feels like an innocent symbol of celebration or identity. It has been taken up by those who see it as a marker of belonging that excludes rather than welcomes. In the current political climate, it has become linked to anger, division, and the language of the far right.

It feels to me like people in England now hesitate to display their own flag at all. It feels risky. What should be a gesture of belonging has become a potential political statement. A person who hangs a St George’s Cross from their window is often assumed to be making a declaration about race, immigration, or politics, even if all they want to do is support their national football team.

This uneasy relationship with national symbols says a great deal about the state of English identity. There is a defensiveness at its heart, a sense of being under threat or misunderstood. In that atmosphere, the flag becomes a weapon as much as a symbol, a way to draw a line between “us” and “them.”

That is what makes the Danish example so interesting. The Dannebrog is not used as a weapon. It feels light, friendly, and open. It can appear at a birthday party, on a Xmas tree, a shop opening, or a small village celebration without anyone worrying about what message it sends. It is simply part of the shared fabric of life. Even foreigners living in Denmark adopt it, placing small paper flags on their children’s birthday cakes or using it to decorate a new home. It becomes part of belonging rather than a test of loyalty.

What fascinates me is how fragile that can be. A flag’s meaning is not fixed; it depends entirely on how people use it and what they allow it to represent. The same piece of cloth can mean celebration or hostility, depending on the context. It can invite or reject. In one country, a flag above the door might say, “welcome, come in.” In another, it might say, “you do not belong here.”

In that sense, flags are a mirror. They reflect not only national identity but also national mood. When a society is confident, comfortable, and outward-looking, its symbols tend to be gentle and inclusive. When a society is anxious or divided, its symbols grow sharper edges. They become rallying points for those who feel threatened, and they begin to exclude as much as they unite.

The question that lingers for me is whether Denmark’s inclusive flag culture can stay that way. As global politics becomes more polarised, and as debates about immigration, identity, and belonging grow louder, will even the Dannebrog begin to carry heavier meanings? Will the far right attempt to claim it, as they have done with the St George’s Cross in England? Or will the deep-rooted Danish habit of using it to celebrate life’s ordinary joys keep it safe from that kind of capture? I suspect the latter will be true.

Perhaps the best defence against the politicisation of a symbol is simply to keep using it for the reasons it was loved in the first place. The more people continue to raise the flag for birthdays, family reunions, and weddings, the harder it is for anyone to twist it into something ugly. The ordinary, joyful use of national symbols may be the strongest possible protection against those who would use them to divide.

Whenever you fly into Denmark you will come through the arrivals door to grannies and grandpas waving tiny Danish flags in anticipation of the arrival of their family members returning from some faraway place. I can't see a future where it means anything other than joy, than welcome. 

The Great Labrador Colour Swap

When we moved from Scotland to Denmark, I expected the obvious differences.

The language, the food, the small obsession Danes have with flags at every possible event.

What I didn’t expect was that even the dogs would change.

Specifically: the Labradors.

In Scotland, if you said "Labrador," you meant a golden one. I grew up in a suburban street of golden Labs ranging from blond to almost ginger but nothing darker. Big, friendly, slightly clumsy creatures with a permanently hopeful look and a tendency to shed a full extra dog’s worth of hair every week. The one across the road was bright enough that it used to wander over to us every Thursday as that was the day mum chucked out all the old biscuit crumbs to refill the tin with pristine custard creams.

They were the family dogs you saw everywhere: in parks, in back gardens, in the Andrex adverts with the mischievous golden Labrador puppy unravelling an entire house-worth of loo roll.

That was the image burned into all our brains. Golden = Labrador. Labrador = Golden. End of story.

Black Labs existed, of course — but they were somehow different. They were serious dogs. Gamekeepers’ dogs walked by men in tweed jackets and green wellies. Dogs that worked for a living, instead of stealing your toast and flattening the flowerbeds. They were the Labradors you weren’t allowed to pet without asking permission, and you definitely didn’t feed them sausages under the table in your holiday boarding house.

Fast forward to Denmark, and suddenly I find myself in an alternate universe. Here, almost all the Labradors are black.

It’s like someone flipped the colour dial when we crossed the North Sea. At first, I thought it was just coincidence, but no, walk through any Danish town, and you’ll see them: sleek, shiny black Labs everywhere, walking with impressive discipline beside their owners, looking ready to herd a thousand invisible sheep at a moment’s notice.

Golden Labs? Practically an endangered species. In fact, until my neighbour took in a rescue one a couple of years ago (to replace her black Lab that had just died) I had seen none in Denmark, and he is still the only one I have met in nearly six years.

Apparently, in Denmark, black Labradors are the default. The norm.

Meanwhile in Scotland, we clearly went for the model that specialised in chasing after ice cream vans and leaping into muddy ponds for no reason at all, when not unravelling loo roll, that is.

It’s one of those tiny cultural differences no one warns you about when you emigrate. You expect the official stuff, healthcare systems, driving rules, baffling types of dairy products, but you don't expect even the basic dog settings to be changed behind your back.

One day you’re living in a land of golden Labs with wayward spirits and a fondness for rolling in dead fish. The next, you’re surrounded by sleek black professionals who look like they could submit a tax return if you handed them a laptop.

The loaf of life...

 or as I prefer to call it, the great rugbrød conspiracy!

It first happened not long after I moved here. As a foreigner, you get offered free language lessons to help you integrate better... in fact that isn't strictly true, you actually get offered them if you move here from abroad, which amused me no end given my Danish husband was offered the very same 'learn Danish course' on arrival after his nearly two decades in Scotland, which was fairly amusing given he was moving here to take up a post as a senior consultant on the Danish Retskrivningsordbog at Dansk Sprognævn, that's kind of like the Danish equivalent of the Académie Française! So, if they'd taken to employing folk with minimal Danish, the country was in deep shit!

So, there I was, a few weeks in to my new course and my teacher, a woman in here early 40s, was trying to get us all to try speaking Danish to each other 'What do you have for lunch in your own countries, other than the rye bread?' was her prompt!

This seemed like a weird question to me, so I replied that we don't tend to eat rye bread in Scotland. She literally gasped and the question escaped her lips: how have you survived into adulthood? She was entirely serious! This teacher had already mentioned she was married to a GP, had three kids and a university degree and yet she genuinely believed that not eating rye bread was so detrimental to one's health that the mere survival into adulthood was not guaranteed without it! 

It's a strange little country, so mono-cultural, so self-confident, so trusting. If you are told by the authorities that rye bread is not just good for your health but necessary to survival, you don't question it. When holidaying in France, Spain, or Thailand, noticing the lack of it on the menu doesn't make you question this received idea, but you simply assume the French, Spanish and Thai parents are still packing their little cherub's lunchboxes with the product gleaned from god knows where because it sure isn't on the supermarket shelves!

My kids have testified to the fact that almost all their classmates bring rye bread with either salami, pâté, or mackerel paste for lunch every day and generally moan about not liking it particularly but knowing they have no choice but to eat it! In the same breath they chastise my kids for being so unhealthy as to have a cheese and baguette sandwich or maybe some leftover macaroni cheese with them for lunch. 

Danish teenagers happily drink, smoke, vape, use snuff, but still accept that for the sake of their health a daily slice of rye bread is a must!

Thomas says his workplace is the same.

I recently spent some months working as a supply teacher in a nursery for kids aged around 10 months to 6 years. Every single day these kids' lunchboxes were 95% identical, despite the fact that the parents had no contact with each other, such is the homogenous nature of this country, outside the big cities at least. And they sure as hell didn't resemble anything you would have found back in my kids' Kirkhill Primary days. There were no crisps, chocolate bars or similar. The lunch was rye bread with one of the three toppings above, occasionally rye bread with a slice of fig on top, carrot sticks, slices of red pepper (never green, yellow, or orange), a handful of nuts, usually Brazil, some uncooked fresh peas, grapes or raisins, occasionally a piece of cheese, and maybe a yogurt, extra low fat. If they had no teeth yet, a few boiled potatoes may be chucked in for good measure. In the infant room I had babies who could say rugbrød med leverpostej (rye bread with pâté) before they could pronounce their own name!

The other teachers would tell them to eat their rye bread before starting on the smaller snacks, without even checking they had rye bread, it was simply a given!

I suddenly realised how much my kids stick out as foreigners with their flask of leftover rogan josh, and how hard it will be for any of them to settle down here with a fully native Dane and have a family with them. All Danes just seem to know this is the only acceptable lunch and create it spontaneously, while my three 'Danish' kids would need bribed to eat a lunch like that and I simply can't see them falling into line if they one day become parents themselves.

And I just turned 57 without eating more than one slice of rye bread a year! Astounding!