Things I’ll miss… and things I won’t

Every time I decide I’m going to write a blog I get a little scrap of paper and start making notes. Usually they are incomprehensible scribbles that I either can’t remember their context for or just ignore altogether.

For example, on my notes while heading home from Amsterdam at the bottom it just says ‘Seagull stalking me’. I can’t remember why I wrote that…

Anyway, as I was sat in the port of IJmuiden waiting for my ferry, I became all sentimental and wrote down what I will miss about Copenhagen; and more importantly, what I won’t miss. Here goes…







What I’ll miss:

Friends: Surprising one, I know. But yeah, there are of course people that I’ll miss a lot. Others I won’t miss quite so much. That’s about as emotional as you’re getting from me today.





Bikes: What the hell has happened to the world? I come back to the UK and suddenly cycle paths don’t exist. Cycling in Copenhagen was wonderful. It cut down journey time while helping to develop a nation of thunder thighs.





FC Copenhagen: I really drew the long straw on this one. Although I’m still writing for them next year, I won’t be able to regularly attend the matches (a phrase I use in my CV, of course). No, sadly I’m resolved to the occasional pop over for Champions League games, or maybe another biggie if one turns up. The experience at the club this year was incredible, and I doubt I’ll ever be able to touch a national trophy ever again.

Language Acquisition: Well after living a year in Denmark, my Danish is naturally superb. I do believe however that two friends have really helped me develop my language skills further. One is Google Translate: I couldn’t have done it without you, man. The other is everyone’s favourite friend, alcohol!

Pretending I know what Europeans are actually saying: The Danes speak wonderful English, as do the Americans and Australians. Even the Irish give it a good crack. However, I will miss harnessing my translation skills to decipher whatever the hell most Europeans are saying. Be it the Spanish lisp, the French drone or the Italian put-a-vowel-on-the-end-of-every-word infliction, it was nice – especially as a northerner – to be the arbiter of the English language.

Herring: There’s nothing nicer than a pickled herring resting on a bed of rugbrød for breakfast. Yum yum yum.

5-a-side football: Living in Copenhagen can be dangerous for your health. I’ve found the diet and social life is very heavy on the stomach. I’ve put on 4 lbs since January – horrific I know! The only way to keep healthy is to find some sport to do. Well I found it, in an open-age football group playing at 7am on a Wednesday and 8am on a Saturday. I will miss playing. I won’t miss cycling up Gothersgade on a freezing December morning, dodging the drunks and bin men.


What I won’t miss:

The Cold: Bloody hell Denmark you seriously need to get this sorted. It wasn’t that it was so cold I couldn’t move, but it was a long winter last year. In the space of a week over October, Copenhagen became a frozen wasteland. The rains promised for November fell as snow, and it was ceaseless until early February. I truly hated layering up with seven jumpers, t-shirts and a massive coat, to cycle with two pairs of gloves on in the driving rain.

Apologising for being British: This was a common one. Often on a year abroad you are asked where you’re from. Some even tried to guess before I told them. I got France most times, once Argentina, and occasionally American. Thankfully, never Australian. Usually I would have to say “Sorry, I’m from the UK”. It sounds strange, but maybe it’s this British sense of crippling self-loathing that makes me apologise. For I know that when I say I’m British, what I’m actually saying is “let’s hold the rest of this conversation in my language”.

People using ‘party’ as a verb: Right, I have never, in my entire life, liked to ‘party’. I have never wanted to party, go party or even make party. I occasionally like to go out. I enjoy a beer. I even like to go to parties. But I do not party. I’ll dance (terribly). I’ll sing (even more terribly). But I will not party.

Pretending to take an interest in Australians: Bar two, I think the stereotype almost fits. They love it, and I don’t.

Carlsberg: Imagine my utter delight when my mother informs me she’s got some beers in to celebrate my return home. Oh, a nice English beer maybe? Nope: Carlsberg. You can’t avoid it in Denmark. It appears you can’t avoid it in England either.

Going home - Part 2

So where were we? Ah yes, I’d just completed my night in Amsterdam. Luckily I survived all the raucous shit that makes The Hangover so hilarious. I really must calm down.

Anyway, I woke on Thursday morning with some Ukrainian guy snoring in my ear. No, this wasn’t one of those ‘what the hell happened last night’ moments; I was sharing a dorm room with six other guys. Raunchy.

The snoring woke me at 7:00, and I was out of the hostel by 7:10. Amsterdam is just like any other city on a summer’s morn. As I walked across the lush green park outside the museum, two sunburnt tramps casually discussed the problems and dilemmas of everyday life, before one of them left to sleep on a grassy slope.

I decided I would get to the ferry as soon as possible, even though it was departing at 17:00. With two bags strapped to me and a bike beside, I knew it could take an Everest ascent effort to get to the port, which was not in Amsterdam as advertised on the internet. Oh no, the ferry terminal was in fact in IJmuiden, a village 30km outside the capital. At this point, I was wondering why I hadn’t just gone with easyjet.

The solution for me was to get a speedboat to a harbour close to the port, and walk from there. I sat roasting under the glorious morning sun waiting for the speedboat. It came, and I couldn’t get on because it was too full. Half an hour later, having befriended some Australians, I boarded a different boat.

Now, these Australians. Why is it, wherever you are in Europe, an Australian pops up out of nowhere? These four guys were actually quite nice – surprising I know. I got chatting to them about Europe and Holland and then sport. I mentioned cricket, and got a blank look from all four sets of eyes. “Nah mate, we follow AFL.” Of course you do. Ever since England beat Australia on their own turf, any Australian I have met suddenly doesn’t know what the concept of cricket is. Instead, Aussie Rules Football takes precedent in the conversation, so that I my only contribution of any relevance is to say the referees look ridiculous when they do that pointy thing (you know what pointy thing I mean).

Cricket has become extinct in the average Aussie’s vocabulary. To even try and mention Alastair Cook would be an invitation for complete social rejection. No, we talked AFL for half an hour, me only occasionally able to mention the C word when they spoke about the stadiums.

As I said, they seemed an OK bunch of chaps. However, one soon turned out to be what I like to call ‘Australian’. The others could almost have been European, but this one guy – I can’t remember his name but it was probably Ricky or Bozza – insisted on using the phrase ‘hanging out the back of’ almost every two minutes.

Now, I seem to remember there being some controversy during the winter about a Sky Sports presenter being a complete knob and suggesting Jamie Redknapp ‘was hanging out the back of’ quite a lot of females. As comedian Alan Davies said at the time: “what kind of idiot thinks his mates respect him when he says that kind of thing?” And, I have to agree. Ricky or Bozza or whatever his name was, in that one repeated phrase, confirmed to me that he was a complete tosser. Richard Keys was rightly sacked: I wanted to throw Bozza overboard.

I eventually left the speed boat and found my way to the ferry terminal, where I was told I would have to wait four hours to board. No worries, I had my book and it was sunny. Unfortunately, I didn’t realise just how sunny it was, and I’m still feeling the effects of a peeling left ear five days later.

The Ferry

I got up off my arse eventually and went to take a good look at the ship. My heart skipped a beat when I saw ‘Princess Seaways – København’ painted on it. I hurriedly dived into my pockets to find my booking confirmation – there was surely no way I had booked a boat back to Denmark… thank God, no, I was just being thick. I was definitely going to Newcastle. I soon boarded the boat.

When I booked my ticket, I was told I could take my bike and store it in the secure bicycle compartment on ship. What I didn’t know was that this ‘secure’ compartment was to be the handrail of the boarding ramp that a thousand motorbikes and cars would speed past. I was sceptical, and so lashed my bike as hard as possible to the rail, like so.


I of course went straight to my cabin upon leaving the car decks. An inside room with no windows – lovely. Importantly it had a bathroom, meaning I wouldn’t have to roam the ship looking for toilet facilities. However, the bathroom wasn’t fitted very well, as this photo demonstrates. The gap between toilet and loo paper was a good meter. I could reach – thankfully – but imagine an infirm old lady stretching her arm across the bathroom, mauve trousers round her ankles. She’s almost gets to the paper when suddenly she slips forward and bangs her head on the sink, mauve trousers still round her ankles. Just saying…

I went for a mooch around the ship after a little kip and a real good top-up of sun cream. In my desperate hunger I scuttled over to the ‘Sea Shop’ to buy some basic supplies. There was no bread. There was no pre-made food. There was only bumper size sacks of Daim bars for €20. Whoever needs €20 worth of Daim bars I do not know. What struck me most however was a very exclusive special offer for bottled water. €2 for still water. The ‘special offer’ sign made me wonder how much the water was before they kindly dropped the price.

Anyway, I spent the rest of the evening either on deck with some old curmudgeons or in my room. I finished my book while quaffing my luxurious still water, and fell asleep with chocolate smeared all over my face, submerged in a mountain of Daim bar wrappers.

I opened my eyes to a generic wake-up call to all passengers: “The ship will be arriving in Newcastle in two hours” – well let me sleep for two more bloody hours then!

Going home - Part 1

Easyjet fly from Copenhagen to Manchester twice a day, seven days a week. It takes one hour and 40 minutes to get from Denmark to the UK, and costs no less than £50. Well, I am currently sitting in a windowless ferry cabin in Amsterdam, coming to the end of a three-day journey to get home. I think I made the wrong choice.

It all sounded so simple at the time of booking. Because my bike is too old and frigid to let me cycle all the way to Amsterdam, instead I changed the ferry booking and got a train ticket to Holland: direct. I booked a cheap room so as to have one glorious night in a new city, and in a sense completely forgot the wonders of aviation.

I was all set. I had a rucksack strapped to my back and one on my front, walking my bike beside me. A walk from my apartment to Copenhagen’s central station usually takes 20 minutes. 45 minutes after I set off, I finally arrived, exhausted and annoyed. I always get annoyed when I leave anywhere: the place, the friends, the relaxed stance to street prostitution. So as usual I sat on a train platform with my bike and my bags, peeved.

I was of course happier when the train arrived, and even more delighted when I got a whole cabin to myself. As it was an overnight train, I booked a bed in a luxurious cabin with free tea and coffee and biscuits and a buffet cart and ironed sheets. Well, actually, of course I didn’t. I booked a ‘travel seat’ in a room with five other ‘seats’, no electricity, no air conditioning and a faulty light fitting.

But no, this was fine. I had my book in my hand and was ready to tackle some Brontë. Of course, about an hour into the journey I was getting tired. I rubbed my eyes a few times and was drifting to sleep when suddenly I sneezed pretty much everywhere. I realised my eyes were swollen and my nose was running. Yep – less than 30 miles from Copenhagen and the pollen of Denmark’s wonderful rural landscape had already infiltrated my pathetic excuse for an immune system.

The occasional sneeze and snot trickle lasted until dark, when I began to drift in and out of sleep. Now, I was happily prepared for the fact that 15 hours on a chair was not going to be the most comfortable of snoozes, but when I finally knocked out we apparently crossed the German boarder. Just gone midnight, I was rudely awoken by an enormous figure bearing over me from the doorway. “Blach blach blach!” he shouted at me and another guy who had joined my cabin. I was petrified. The other man handed over a laminated piece of card, so I understood this gargoyle-like German policeman wanted to see my passport. “I give you my passport, you give me a pacemaker OK?” He looked sceptically at it – as they always do – and reluctantly gave it back to me – as they damn right always do.

The rest of the night went relatively smoothly, and I arrived in Amsterdam happy enough. I eventually found my room – shared – in the south of the city and departed to find something to do.

When I told a friend a few weeks ago – well, not really a friend, more of one of those people you end up talking to at a party – that I would be going to Amsterdam for one night, he said it would be “wild”, and enviously looked at me.

Now, what on earth did my friend mean by this? Sure, Amsterdam’s a pretty groovy place with its canals and bicycles and – dare I say it – cheese. But hey, there’s more to do in Amsterdam than eat cheese, as I found out. First, I went to the Van Gough museum, before heading for the Heiniken Brewery. Ha, crazy eh?

Anyway, it was getting late so I sat in a park and read for a bit before having a look at the old Olympic Stadium in the city. There I ate some food in the Stadium. I know; it doesn’t get much wilder than that.

The next day I headed to the speedboat that would take me to my ferry. My head was still hazy from all that cheese and art the day before.

So anyway, that was Amsterdam. Part two – my amazing ferry adventure – will follow…