Ten clues that I am just me (I was going to say international, not just British, not Scandinavian, but actually I meant, just me)

1. I am happy in a climate that is HOT, and under skies that are BRIGHT, and clear, and blue. I stayed away from Britain all those years partly because the climate was so miserable. I'm not sure what happened two years ago ..

2. I am very polite, and will always try to be pleasant to people, and the more so if they are polite to me, regardless of what their social status is. This is because (a) in a country where life is hard it is what people do to survive - it is a kind of deliberate counterfactuality - and (b) bad manners just make people repulsive.

3. I like to laugh, and like to make people laugh, and I think it is very important to see most things as absurd, most of the time. (Because they are.)

4. I am extremely eccentric. I spent much of my life getting here, and I am damned if I am going to damp myself down for pathetic types who get scared looking outside their hobbit holes. The people who speak my language are all equally eccentric or more, and in fact the non-existence of this on these northern shores is one of my chief complaints.

5. I love to read, and I love to learn, which I regard as a beautiful thing. And I regard education as the greatest excitement and its own great reward, not as something cruel to spare children from.

6. I am getting increasingly intolerant of food which doesn't have strong spice in it. I like strong clear flavours, and I've started putting chili in my tea.

7. I just want to eat prawns all the time.

8. I like to be silly, and think silliness is one of the greatest virtues. When you are being silly you are both not taking yourself seriously, which is good for the world, and being very serious about what is important.

9. I don't believe in cultural relativism. Having lived in two, no my god three cultures (British, Egyptian Arab, Danskie), it's clear to me that some things in some cultures are a hell of a lot better than others. Won't go into details in public, though. I get into a lot of trouble. We had freedom of speech in Cairo. We don't here.

10. Having learned how to be friends late in life after a miserable childhood and early life, making and being friends is something I really love to do and miss, dreadfully, here. I am a warm person and love to connect to people. When people blank me out, I retreat into a sort of internal exile to avoid misery. I hope I don't forget how to make friends living in Denmark.

And 11. Having lived in the South for years and years, and found it infinitely more fun and more enriching than the West, I know that real life can involve so much more, and so much more intensity, than the modern Western way of life. Which is a kind of dreadful poverty.

So there.

It's Europe, not just Denmark

I am getting some perspective shift as I think to and fro about living here in Denmark. Undeniably, settling in here is really difficult for people from outside, and I call them / us ‘internationals’ because ‘foreigners’ as used locally is a word that just means, ‘people we don’t want.’ (Denmark, fix yourself.) Living here as an international is very difficult to crack socially, hard to manage (let’s face it) materially, and often full of hurts, small and large. But although Denmark is more inward-looking, more peripheral and socially deader than other European countries, I think it’s very unlikely that settling in any European country, including Britain and France, would be what one might call easy. It might be easier to make friends, but I’m sure that in every case, most of one’s friends would be other internationals.

My point is that I think these European societies are very dense and settled and unused to change, and that this makes them hard to get inside. Whereas this does not seem to be true of the US. Families don’t stay in the same place, everyone moves around the country, there is extreme social mobility, all the nineteenth- and twentieth-century immigration melting-pot thing, and a second-generation American is president. There are big cities, lots of subcultures all over the place, MOVEMENT.

There are various other places in the world that are genuinely international, multicultural. Cairo is one. Hong Kong. Bombay. Delhi? Don’t know. Jakarta? Writer, tell me. Singapore, certainly. Shanghai maybe. Rio. Buenos Aires. Those are a bit different. It’s not that they’re rich melting-pot countries to which people came from all over. These are all cities that were colonized by foreign elites, multiple times over, not just the British. Cairo, for example, was run by foreign elites without a break from 330BC to 1952, that’s more than 2,000 years. Makes you a bit more open to outsiders. Also, all these cities (don’t know about Rio) were always on major trade routes, and are still major international crossroads. (Scandinavia? Are we joking?)

Anyway. In these places it is easy to live as an international, and not just for people who are jetted in by oil companies. I turned up in Cairo on my own with nothing but my education, and did fine.

But why *would* it be easy to settle in Europe? I think that we, for one (meaning me and my family), made a big mistake in our thinking coming here. We are white, English, privileged (though I hate that word and have done my time to work it off), educated at the best universities in the world. We don’t get the racism that is flying around here, but we get the xenophobia and the intense resistance to anything from outside.

In my spouse’s field, Muslims in Europe, it is apparent that second- and later-generation Muslims in Europe do not prosper. Very few manage to achieve a decent education; they become dissatisfied, they turn to the counterculture and they get networked into radicalism. Yes, it’s a worse starting situation in Europe because European Muslims are not skilled and educated (those go to the US). But the only niche they can find is at the bottom, and surprise, surprise, they are not happy. Well, I think this doesn’t only apply to asylum-seekers.

I too wanted to try living in different places around the world. I did it for fifteen years, extremely happily, in Cairo. But I think in coming to Europe we have all come to the wrong place.