The Danish summer

Copenhagen was apparently built in an era besieged by heat waves and tropical weather. Everything about the city seems geared towards lazy summer afternoons: the large open areas, cafés with a majority of seating space outdoors, the building colours that complement deep blue skies, harbour swimming places, abundant public barbeque areas and a penchant for cycling and ice cream.

The forefathers must have been truly disappointed when, after their grand architecture and social engineering was complete, the meteorology switched and Denmark assumed its now all too familiar role as bearer of snow, ice, cold and five-hours-of-daylight for ten months of the year.

Curiously, the Danes seem unphased by their small window of opportunity and slip into floaty dresses and pavement culture in a matter of hours. The British embrace their brief days in the sun with an outfit hastily assembled from a teenage Spanish holiday topped off with a Kangol hat, before turning lobster red in a Weatherspoon’s beer garden. The danskere start holding street flea markets, throwing Mediterranean 40-person garden meals and hanging out on their ’stoops’ in white vests like it’s a Los Angeles heatwave, in an eerily natural manner. Inevitably the following day is overcast, rainy, tens of degrees lower and everyone is back wearing scarves and lighting candles, apparently without any embarrassment hangover. Mystifying.