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!