WWOOF: Danish Dreams

Quite suddenly in early June, my flatmate and I cemented our plans to go WWOOFing in Denmark for the summer. For those unfamiliar with WWOOF, it stands for Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms, and connects thousands of farms in nearly 100 countries with people willing to work on them. Workers (known as WWOOFers) are paid in food and lodging for their four or five hours’ daily labour, and have the chance to integrate well into life in another country. It appealed to me as a way of both exploring for very little money, and spending time in the great green yonder.

image from roamaholic.com

So we left in mid-June, and returned in late July. ‘Why Denmark?’ everyone asked, since the most-publicised WWOOFing is grape-picking in the golden vineyards of Italy and France. It’s hard to say why Denmark, except that everything I’d heard about it had been good, I’d always wanted to explore Scandinavia, and as a redhead I knew a summer toiling in the boiling Mediterranean would require armfuls of suncream. We wrote to three farms asking to stay for about 10 days each, and had rapid friendly responses – we were welcome.

It was unlike any travelling I’ve done before: a whirlwind of newness with the calm of farming life at its heart; mornings picking apples, afternoons sailing, evening campfires. The first farm was a well-organised 16-hectare affair, with neat rows of apples, pears and currants in rolling fields. Our work picking stung apples was easy, though I took this photo in a very rare sunny moment:

Kysøko farm in southern Zealand

The second was a large beautiful home, with a forest, lakes and ancient apple and walnut orchards beyond. We worked very hard, in a heatwave, felling trees, clearing a lake of reeds and waging war on six-foot stinging nettles. Our reward was koldskål, a sweet buttermilk drink which is poured into a bowl and covered with little macaron biscuits. Denmark is a land for people with a sweet tooth. Later, we found a rowing boat hidden in the trees, cleaned it, and spent an afternoon rowing lazily over the lake.

The third was a thatched yellow cottage, small and crowded, with bikes and dogs galore.

Omnipresent bicycles

We picked strawberries and tomatoes and explored the small island of Fyn, which sits in the centre of Denmark. Along with a Russian and an American WWOOFer, we also visited Egeskov Castle, the best-preserved Renaissance water castle in Europe:

Egeskov – ‘the living castle’

We bought Danish Interrail passes to get unlimited train travel on 4 days within the month, so we managed to explore a good deal of the country. Zealand, the easternmost island where Copenhagen lies, was my favourite: an unbelievably green, lush, gently undulating landscape, brimming with charming towns, bright rivers and friendly people.

At the end of our time WWOOFing we spent some days in Copenhagen staying with a friendly law student, courtesy of Airbnb, which continued our integration into Danish life instead of interrupting it as a hotel would. Copenhagen, with just over 1 million people, seemed the perfect-sized city, with much of London’s glitter but none of its dull, smoky summer air. It felt fresh and clean, with wide streets and streams of bicycles. We wandered happily all over the place: the Little Mermaid, the Danish Parliament, the busy shopping streets and markets, the villa-lined harbour islands, the quiet cemetery where Hans Christian Andersen and Søren Kierkegaard are buried.

I passed as Danish the whole time, probably because I’m redheaded and tall. Having spent French holidays feeling very conspicuously not French, I found this immensely pleasing. However, Danish is a tricky language to pick up; on the page it looks like a mixture of German, Dutch and English, but the Danes skip consonants and swallow the middles of words when they speak, making it impossible to follow. The suburban station Sydhavn, for example, is pronounced ‘Soo-haan’. So although in shops I could get away with nods, smiles and ‘tak’ (thank you), sometimes I had to let my Danish cover slip and ask for English – which they all spoke perfectly, fluently and charmingly.

And that was the real thing about the Danes – they were infinitely kind, helpful and friendly when we needed it. They lack the English sort of anxious manners, and rarely bother with ‘sorry’, ‘excuse me’ or ‘please’ (Danish does not have a word for ‘please’), all staples of English discourse. But when we were lost, or couldn’t figure out the different coins, or just wanted to chat, they were the warmest people I’ve ever met. An elderly lady on a train from Odense to Copenhagen shared her strawberries with me; our WWOOF hosts took us out on their sailing boats and to their markets, bought us lunch and chocolate and treated us with immense kindness.

A few other highlights (of many!):

(L-R) A country church, Nyhavn in Copenhagen, Viking longship at Roskilde, goslings, tomatoes, Egeskov Castle, Kronborg Castle, Copenhagen harbour, southern Zealand.

Never have I felt so settled in a foreign country, especially one whose language I don’t speak. Denmark is a wonderful little land, bursting with surprises, beauty and warmth. If you go, don’t just stay in Copenhagen – explore the rest. It’s perfect.

Wild

In the summer of 1995, Cheryl Strayed walked 1,100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, which twines more than twice that distance along the west coast of America from the Mexican border to Canada. She did it to conquer her demons. The result of her hike was a memoir, Wild, published in 2012, which she calls “a journey from lost to found”.

Her mother had died four years earlier of cancer, scattering her stepfather and siblings across the country; her father was abusive; she had recently divorced her own husband after engaging in repeated one-night stands and taking up heroin. After the divorce, Strayed was the name she invented for herself: she had come “unmoored by sorrow”, and had strayed from the path she wanted. She decided to hike the Pacific Crest Trail alone, which she hoped would “both make me into the woman I knew I could become and turn me back into the girl I’d once been”.

It’s a classic theme of literature: you feel lost, you travel alone, you find yourself again. But this is no On The Road or As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. This is no young, disenchanted man going on an adventure to experience new things. It’s also nothing like Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods, which relates an equally daunting hike along the Appalachian Trail, but from the comfortable perspective of a middle-aged man who can return to his family any time he chooses. Wild shows a woman at the point of no return: Cheryl must hike this trail alone, or lose her sense of self forever.

Five pages into Wild, I am deeply uncomfortable. Cheryl intersperses the account of her hike with memories of her mother’s agonising death, her divorce and other events which have left her deeply grieving. But the hike provides no relief for the reader from the onslaught. From the beginning she details the heaviness of her pack (nicknamed Monster) which she can barely lift, the immediate blistering and tearing of her skin from its weight, the torturous blackening and loss of her toenails, the agony in every step she takes. At night she is cold and utterly alone, listening to branches snap and imagining a bear or a mountain lion prowling outside. She has filled her stove with the wrong fuel, and cannot cook any hot food; she has brought far too little money to enjoy the comforts of the occasional rest stop. She is infinitely vulnerable to wild animals; to the strength needed to hike; to men she encounters. She feels “creeping anxiety” from a miner who gives her a ride.

The trail terrain varies from the Mojave Desert…

Picture from http://www.pcta.org

To the peaks of the Sierra Nevada:

Picture from backpacker.web

Yet Cheryl battles on, through blazing heat and knee-deep snow, only bypassing the High Sierra from the sheer necessity of their unseasonably snowy peaks. She finds friends in other hikers, acts as “one of the guys” at a rest stop and eventually becomes a seasoned hiker. Her body, which she has always thought of badly, becomes tanned and muscular and a useful tool rather than the site of her low self-image. She does, indeed, gain back her sense of self.

Twenty years on, she is happily married with two children, so it seems that the hike did conquer her demons. It also produced a visceral, painful, humbling and courageous book, which I am deeply happy to have found.

Secret Garden, SW9

It’s election day, 7th May, and a bright sunny day for voting in our next government. I’m feeling jubilant, because a couple of days ago I handed in my last essay and have now completed my degree! I didn’t write a dissertation, but I think four 4,000-word essays, all with the same deadline, is equally exhausting.

To celebrate I went out for dinner, and found a place so fun and special that I’ve decided to forego my usual suspicion of food blogging and write a post about it (I’m not suspicious of food blogging in general, just suspicious that I’m not very good at it). Warning: there will be almost no Instagram-worthy photos of my food. If you’re expecting mouth-watering tableaux, close-ups of glinting utensils and blindingly white plates and food that looks like it needs a museum label, look elsewhere. This restaurant, silly as it sounds, is actually better experienced through words.

A few minutes’ walk from my flat, opposite Clapham North tube station, a red-brick wall snakes around the junction of Landor Road and Clapham Road. The Clapham North pub stands on the corner, newly-painted in smart grey, and is joined to the wall by lots of creeping ivy. If you follow the wall’s curve, you find a small wooden door, without knocker or handle on the outside, and a bell next to it concealed in a birdbox. You must ring the bell, announce your name (or ‘whisper the password’) and allow yourself to be led inside.

This ritual seems a bit cloak-and-dagger in Clapham’s rush hour, when disappearing through a blank wooden door on a busy junction might suggest undesirable antics. But as you step inside, and walk up a flight of wooden stairs, rush hour and passersby fade so rapidly that the quiet is startling. You feel, not like a spy or a kidnappee, but like a child who finds a secret passage or a hole in a hedgerow. The stairs are bestrewn with flowers, plants, trailing vines and shrubs in pots; at the top is a flowery trellis, a wooden bench, clusters of terracotta, all of it effortlessly dainty in the spring twilight.

This magical little garden is the entrance to the Secret Garden, a pop-up restaurant which is offering fresh, elegant and garden-inspired food to the people of Clapham from now until August. They had me at ‘garden food’, really, but I was tempted even more by the prospect of visiting a restaurant spilling over with garden, instead of a garden spilling over with restaurants. And I was not disappointed.

Inside, you’d never know this was a pop-up and not a permanent restaurant. The site used to be 409 Restaurant (it’s located at 409 Clapham Road), but it’s been bewitched into an airy grotto: tubs and jugs of real flowers brimmed from every corner, the tables were wooden and homely, a carved tree stood in the centre of the room and twined its curling branches across the roof beams. We sat in a corner and ordered cocktails from the friendly waitress, feeling immediately content. We were sitting by a sash window, lifted to let in the breeze, which overlooked Clapham Road and the setting sun. The cocktails were wonderful: I drank a heady mix of gin, blackcurrant, lemon and cardamom, called ‘Great British Cobbler’, which tasted fresh and delicate.

The menu was as garden-inspired as I’d hoped, and a good deal more elegant. It’s divided between ‘the patch’ – vegetables dishes mostly – ‘the field’ – rabbit, venison, wild boar – and ‘the pond’ – trout, other seafood: all British, organic and as local as possible. Before our food came, we were given a little glass mug of mushroom broth, hot and frothy and delicious even for a usual mushroom-hater like me. I ate the dish called ‘Peas and Love’: a pea and mint mousse with asparagus, samphire and goat curd from Neal’s Yard. It was so fresh and light that it felt like eating grass from a meadow (in the best possible way). My flatmate ate guineafowl ballotine with chorizo and parmesan risotto, spinach and tomatoes, also apparently delicious.

And then pudding, which for me is the highlight of any meal, the course I look eagerly forward to and will never willingly miss. I’m sure I’m in the minority when I declare I would far rather have a main and a pudding than a starter and a main. In any case, the menu looked very promising, and so it proved to be. The one photo I took (because I really had to!):

The Edible Garden

This is the Edible Garden, which proved to be far more chocolatey and decadent than the name suggested (I’d hoped it wasn’t a pretentious name for fruit salad). A flowerpot of dark chocolate encased ‘compost’ of crumbled brownie, I think, and was filled with little sugar snails, mushrooms and other garden delights. I really didn’t want to eat it, it was so charming, but no pudding has ever beaten me yet. Best of all, it only cost £7: a couple of quid more than a standard cheesecake or ice-cream, but containing infinitely more care, creativity and flavour. It was fun!

The place was quiet when we arrived but had gathered a lively buzz by the time we left, and felt very cheery. Twilight had drawn in, but I still managed a reasonable shot of the quiet stairs on the way out:

Not that this photo does justice to the plants – if they look a tad sporadic then I just took the photo from a bad angle. It really felt like a garden, much more so than some other ‘gardens’ I could mention. I was smitten and still am. If you find yourself in London between now and August, make the short trip to Clapham and discover the tasty, unpretentious and actually joyful time you can spend behind a small wooden door in the middle of the city.

The Nether

Imagine a place where you can be whoever you want, and where you can do anything without consequence. It’s like the internet but designed to look like reality. It’s completely immersive. When the real world strips away its trees to pave roads, enacts harsh laws and infringes on your personal freedoms, there’s a way out: this virtual wonderland. “Just log in, choose an identity and indulge your every desire.”

This place is the focal point of Jennifer Haley’s play The Nether, currently showing at the Duke of York’s Theatre. But before I talk about the play in detail, I’ve got a couple of questions:

• Should the laws of the real world hold true for virtual reality?
• Who are we when we use the internet? Do we remain ourselves, or do our identities subtly shift?

The Nether is uncomfortable to watch but essential to ponder. It’s a brilliantly-written, cleverly-staged exploration of these questions, using one of the most gripping and taboo topics of all: paedophilia.

We open with Morris, an investigating officer from the Nether, interrogating a man named Sims for his creation of an alternative virtual identity. Their rapid exchanges give tantalising clues to the nature of this identity. Morris feels that she is responsible for bringing Sims to justice and destroying the server that contains his virtual realm, but Sims argues that the Nether is beyond her jurisdiction and his realm is his own affair.

Morris and Sims. This image, and all others below, from http://www.royalcourttheatre.com

I’m not sure how many spoilers to reveal here. But since the press releases for the play divulge more details, I’ll continue. We gradually learn that Sims has created a virtual identity as Papa, living sometime in the nineteenth century and owning a house called The Hideaway. This realm is exquisitely beautiful and appealing: a lost idyll of gently rustling trees, golden sunshine, gramophones and little girls in white dresses. The youngest, Iris, has the bedroom of every little girl’s dreams, and likes to giggle with Papa while he shells peas.

Iris and Papa (centre stage is open, and is surrounded by an aligning backdrop of sky and trees)

The Hideaway, says Sims, is a place where people can be themselves. And what is that self? ‘Guests’ arrive, other real people entering this virtual realm in their own virtual identities, to have sex with nine-year-old Iris and mutilate her with an axe. The Hideaway is a business enterprise, fulfilling the desires of real-life paedophiles, including Sims, while raking in money. Iris is indestructible because she’s imaginary; she is her innocent, bouncing self after every episode of sex and murder. But of course she’s not quite imaginary. She too is the virtual front of a real person, and she is the most recent in a long line of people acting out the same child identity again and again.

The staging of the play expertly contrasts the apparent tranquil beauty of the realms of the Nether with the harsh reality it tries to escape. Its digital, manufactured, created nature is continually present: in references to coding and software; the fact that Sims has succeeded more than anyone else in making a virtual realm feel truly immersive; using projectors to show the transformation from real to virtual.

Transforming into virtual selves

I won’t give away any more of the plot. It twists tightly around on itself and concludes in an anguished tangle, leaving the audience to attempt answers to its deeply troubling questions. The staging is troubling too: Sims’ face, the face of the known paedophile, often fills the stage backdrop in brief pauses. It made me uncomfortable to look at:

How far can we condone the use of a virtual realm to express taboo desires like paedophilia? Can there, should there, be jurisdiction over a place which is, to an extent, imaginary? These questions are highly relevant now, not just in the future. Currently it’s illegal in many countries to create cartoon or drawn child pornography, despite some evidence suggesting it has no real-life consequences for child abuse. But there are actions online which manifest themselves in the real world, like rape and death threats on Twitter and other social media which can lead to recipients (often women) being terrified to leave their homes or even suffering actual abuse. Laws are slowly shifting to acknowledge the power that the internet has in real life, but the two still remain largely separated in legal terms – and in our many of our imaginations. The Nether forces us to see that this distinction may become more and more blurred.

City Boys in the Sky

Mostly I love London, but every so often its glittering urbanity drives a little wedge into my heart.

When you hear the phrase ‘sky garden’, what springs to mind? Perhaps a rooftop terrace brimming with flowers, or something more futuristic like a pod atop a skyscraper; or even some kind of elevated park like New York’s High Line, a mile-long railway 30 feet off the ground which the city transformed into a free public park.

The High Line: image from boomsbeat.com

Everything about the High Line, as far as I can tell, is good. It’s fresh and inventive, it lets green space meander through grey neighbourhoods, and it adheres to the notion that parks should be free for everyone to use. So why, oh why, if New York can organise a project like this, has London failed so spectacularly?

Let me explain. In January this year, the Walkie Talkie (a.k.a. 20 Fenchurch St, London) opened the doors to its Sky Garden. Billed as ‘the exclusive setting of London’s highest public garden’, it was actually, as a Guardian article pointed out, a ‘”public park” used to justify building such a vast office block on the edge of a conservation area, outside the City of London’s planned cluster of towers’.

Here’s the Walkie Talkie in all its glory:

image from Wikipedia

There are many things wrong with the idea that monstrous, looming buildings can be justified if they have a public garden at the top, not least the fact that the ‘nature’ of the area, and all the species which wriggle and grow in it, has been cut off from pollination and biodiversity by being shoved indoors and elevated hundreds of feet. This is not anyone’s idea of conserving nature except sterilised city boys’.

I might still have forgiven the designers, if the garden had actually been what it claimed to be: ‘London’s highest public garden’. Its website slogan is ‘uniquely different’ (I won’t even waste time on the pithy idiocy of that phrase), and indeed if you’re expecting a garden it certainly is different. Ever seen a garden quite like this?

image from skygarden.london

That smudge of green in the distance is the garden. But it’s a bit small, let’s get another shot.

image from citmagazine.com

Not only is the reason for the garden’s existence fundamentally flawed, its reality is almost comically disappointing. Look at the image above, dear reader. What does it remind you of? For me it was like being trapped partly in a Heathrow terminal and partly the world’s worst-designed bus station. Everything is shiny, chilled and hard. The terraces are unheated, so on my visit it was noticeably brisk, which I don’t mind in a real park but which is odd for a space designed for sitting and drinking in. The soaring glass and metal arches are dispiriting, and the thick windows seem designed to pen people in rather than let them feel close to the city around them. I took a photo to show the closest you can get to the Shard:

The space is perfectly poised as a setting to take beautiful photos of the Shard, being about halfway up it, and then the planners decided that thick glass, a wide slabbed terrace and more glass was the best way to take advantage of this position.

Above all, the ‘garden’, as you can see, is endless rows of unhappy herbs and shrubs in drab soil. I don’t even know what species they were because they were unlabelled, and some of them had glaring spotlights boiling onto their leaves. Surrounded by the bright gleaming metal, they lost all bloom and life. And on ascending the terraces, I found the saddest plants of all on the other side:

‘Exquisitely landscaped public gardens‘? I despair.

I think the worst thing about this space, on reflection, is the assumptions behind it. Assumptions about who the public are and what we want to do, for a start. It’s true that when I visited a few people were sitting on sofas and at tables drinking alcohol (this was at 1pm), but there were lots more milling around, and I refuse to believe I was the only one disappointed. The Sky Pod bar was expensive, with supercilious staff and fancy sandwiches; the Darwin seafood and grill place above it is even pricier, and the very top Fenchurch restaurant reaches very silly prices indeed. With beautiful irony, though, each level is further away from the windows and therefore the view; the more you pay, the more you’re stuffed into a constricting space away from the city.

And that assumption is really at the heart of my problem with this building. It’s not public at all. It’s meant for the wealthy city workers who dwell beneath, who can get a nice view any time, to buy lots of expensive drinks and woo clients over a lobster thermidor. The website literally says it all in one sentence: ‘exquisitely landscaped public gardens and London’s most exclusive social spaces’. Doesn’t that contradiction in terms make anyone else’s head ache?