Brambles

It is odd how smells affect the human brain. Example: the leaking water pipe in our kitchen has finally been fixed but there is an odd damp smell in the air. If I close my eyes I'm immediately transported to my great-grandmother's pantry/scullery in rural Denmark circa 1981. My great-grandmother lived in a damp old house in a small village. She had a huge garden which supplied her (and her two sons who remained with her) with fresh produce virtually all year round. The house was always in constant need of repair, the loo was outside and there was no hot water - but I had my tree house in an apple tree, the attic was filled with relics pre-WWII and I'd do little archaeological digs at the back of the house (next to the caravan where my mother slept as a teenager, behind the makeshift football pitch/outdoors badminton court and right by the cherry trees). At Christmas time, the house would fill with her eleven children, their spouses and own offspring. Her sons would sit around the big table with their playing cards, their cigarettes and beer bottles. Her daughters would be in the kitchen cooking the Christmas food, opening the mysterious jars on the top shelves of the pantry and cursing the lazy men.

My great-grandmother (and her two sons) moved into our little rural town some fifteen years later. Her house had become too cold and too damp for an old lady. She finally got hot running water, a real bathroom and a shop across the street. But she had her sons build her a pantry and she turned most of the new garden into a vegetable patch.

She passed away some six years ago. And here I am, her quiet great-grand-daughter, in a Glasgow tenement flat on an overcast Saturday afternoon and I'm looking forward to picking brambles later this year and making bramble jam - just like Nan would've expected of me.

In Which I Quote A 70s Icon

I never thought I'd quote Peter Frampton, buffon'd singer of the '70s, but in the words of the man who made one of the best selling live albums of all time and wrote the winner of Eurovision 2008*, oh baby, baby it's a small world.

I'm surfing Ravelry when I come across a pattern by Slagt En Hellig Ko who's cool with /many who's cool with Mr Palnatoke who's one of my dearest friends.

Oh baby, baby, it's a small world.

(* okay, just listen to the song and don't tell me it's not a variation upon Mr Frampton's best-known song?)

If Food Be The Music of Life.. Hang On.

Robert McLiam Wilson is an author from Northern Ireland who wrote a series of critically acclaimed novels in the early to mid-1990s. Unsurprisingly he was interested in exploring what constitutes 'nationality'. At that point I was interested in his works from a literature student's point-of-view: could I say he was 'post-colonial'? Could I yoke him in with writers in Scotland who were busy reclaiming their history, language and culture?

Nowadays I am an expat and I find myself wondering about nationality in far more personal terms. McLiam Wilson claimed that he could only define nationality negatively: "What gives it its chiaroscuro, its particular flavour is a dash of hatred and fear" (I quote this from memory). As a Dane, I find myself part of a history which is not unique - it is the history of any small nation fearing its bigger neighbours. Danes' attitudes towards Germany and Sweden are complicated. In recent years the 'dash of hatred and fear' has become more than a dash in Danish politics as right-wing politicians play upon fear of the Others to secure votes. But is that my definition of being Danish? That I support any football team playing against Germany (and to be frank, I actually do for some bizarre reason)? It'd be a poor way of defining oneself.

As the days are getting longer and as the sun starts to beam down, I find myself longing for koldskål - a dish which is the epitome of summer in Denmark. And so it is: the most obvious expression of my being Danish is through food. A positive definition, thankfully. I have found a near-by supplier of rye-bread and my local supermarket stocks food items I never used to touch in Denmark, but which I now happily sample ever so often: salami sausages, Danish cheeses and the inevitable bacon. Sometimes I even make frikadeller (meat balls) with kold kartoffelsalat (cold potato salad). It feels silly but in a comforting way.

Koldskål is not so easy to come by, though. Its main ingredient is buttermilk and that's not very easy to find (unless you want to go to another part of Glasgow and pay about £1 for half a pint from an organic food store). Here's the recipe and yes, it's a main dish..

4 cups of buttermilk
2 eggs
4 tbsp sugar
Dash of vanilla
Juice of 1 lemon

Beat the eggs, sugar, lemon juice and vanilla together in the bowl the soup is to be served in. Beat the buttermilk and fold in a little at a time. Chill. Serve on top of small vanilla biscuits.

Yum.

Riddle Me This: What Can You Do With Paper?

Today a gækkebrev arrived. Literally meaning "a riddling letter", a gækkebrev is a letter in the shape of an elaborate paper cut-out with a riddle written in its middle. Sometimes a snowdrop is included with the letter, sometimes the riddle just alludes to the snowdrop.

The letter is commonly associated with Easter in Denmark and school children absolutely love making them. The reason? Quite apart from kids being creative and conjuring up gorgeous paper cut-outs, the letters bear a prize: an Easter egg. Above all other things, the gækkebrev is anonymous and the writer will leave a hint in the shape of dots (four dots if your name has four letters etc). If you can identify the sender, you win an Easter egg. If you are fooled by the riddler, you owe him or her an Easter egg.

People will go to great lengths to fool the recipient of a gækkebrev. They might post the letter in another town, they might get a friend to write for them in case their handwriting is too distinct or they might even deliberately travel out of the country and get someone else to post their gækkebrev. Or perhaps that is just my family and friends?

The sender of my letter wrote me using a painstakingly different handwriting and altered the number of letters in her name - opting to sign with a pet name rather than her real name. Sadly, I still recognised the handwriting (your lower-case "r" is really distinct, Chris) and now I'm awaiting my prize. I love traditions - particularly when they go my way.

A few relevant links:
+ A guide to DIY gækkebreve in English
+ The fairy tale writer Hans Christian Andersen's paper cut-outs and gækkebreve. Gorgeous stuff.
+ Contemporary paper art by Dane Peter Callesen carries on the tradition of paper cut-outs and paper art - and he really, really ups the game. My current favourite of his is Icy Sea/Eis Meer which has been created using an A4 sheet.

Our Protagonist Wonders..

Two questions: How do you say "I would like to buy six live chicken, please" in German? And if I were to say to you: "You look like a one-eyed pirate except you have two eyes," how would you interpret that?

I try to keep track of news in my erstwhile home country of Denmark. The more I read about government incentives, the happier I am that I chose to move to the UK where my being foreign isn't treated as a disease. It would have been far more difficult for my Scottish partner to move across and I dread to think what it would have been like if David had not had a very obvious Scottish surname. One day I'll reclaim Denmark from the people who annexed my nationality and turned it into something completely alien and repulsive. Right now I'll just sit here and wonder what on earth happened to Denmark.

Cooking experiment: Danish rice pudding cooked with coconut milk instead of regular milk and served with fresh raspberries = very, very yummy.

PS. "George W. Bush praises Tanzania" - a news headline from today which I find really quite amusing.