2020 is turning out to be a unique Xmas for many. In 2019, when we decided to emigrate, I forgot to qualify my promises of many shared holidays and visits home with 'unless an imminent global pandemic brings the world to a standstill'... How could I have been so remiss?
In summer, things had calmed down enough that I got back to Scotland once, and down to Italy once too. Charlotte moved in with us for a few months and Marcel got over to Denmark albeit without his other half, which is so much more than the majority of international families managed this year. But this resurgence of the virus meant I had my first Christmas holiday apart from my kids. Marcel and Milly live in London and somehow managed to escape by getting on the last train before the government threw London into lockdown. So they're spending Xmas with her mother but haven't a clue when they'll next be allowed home. So Marcel had a family around him, even if it was a different one. Mum got over to Derek's so had a family too, even if it was a smaller one than she's used to.
Charlotte had decided by the end of November to investigate the Covid test requirements for both Spain and Denmark before buying a ticket home for the holidays, but that was before several spokes got entangled in her wheels... Firstly, she caught Covid at an American Thanksgiving dinner thrown by one of her flatmates just for their own household, so everything was on hold for the first two weeks of December. Next, her appointment to pick up her Spanish residence permit, which was horribly complicated by Brexit, was moved from December to January, leaving her with no physical proof that she had a legit reason for needing back into Spain if the situation worsened. Finally, having no Danish health card number made it difficult to book herself the Corona test she needed to fly back home to Madrid after Xmas. She decided that the best option was to stay in Spain, despite her flatmates managing to escape home for Xmas (for the most part at least). She contacted the family she usually au pairs for to see if she could see them off and on for Xmas and was to be warmly welcomed, on condition she got herself a negative corona test before dropping round for an extended stay starting on Xmas eve as they have an elderly relative staying with them.
On Xmas eve, she received blood test results saying that although she had recently had covid, her blood was on the borderline between 'recently infected, on the verge of developing antibodies' and 'possibly still infected'. As it had been a full 24 days since she had been diagnosed Covid positive, much longer than the 14 day quarantine period, she had been back at work nearly two weeks, and all her symptoms had disappeared, she had assumed the results were a formality, but with 24 hours to go Charlotte found herself Xmasless. The family were almost as devastated as she was and drove her over all the food and presents they had prepared for her and she got to eat her feast with them on a 4 hour Xmas zoom call from her bedroom, but their girls were upset, as was Charlotte who is the most family-oriented of my kids. Their many hours on zoom, their banquet, our game of monopoly and our family Xmas evening zoom call with Leeds and Glasgow made being entirely alone for Xmas passable, or at least as passable as that ever could be for a 20 year old girl. Hopefully when she goes for another test on Monday, her bloods will have levelled off enough to let her spend New Year and her 21st birthday next week with her Madrid family, otherwise I've no idea what she'll do. One thing is for sure, Charlotte has grown and matured once again through the adversity life has thrown at her, to be a very capable young woman.
I don't personally know anyone who's had Covid. Of course, I've heard of many friends of friends, classmates of my kids and even Léon's boss at the restaurant but not a single close friend or relative has caught it. This doesn't mean I've been reckless or similar, it just means that other than the restrictions this year has brought, it hasn't really impacted me greatly... or hadn't.
When you live in a big city you're of course at a greater risk than us out here in the countryside. And when you flatshare with students or assistant teachers you are meeting people daily who are meeting a lot of people. Charlotte has an American flatmate, Heidi. Heidi was missing home so arranged a Thanksgiving meal for the whole flat at the end of last month. Charlotte ended up sitting directly opposite Heidi at the meal and of course, Heidi woke up a few days later with Covid. Charlotte began warning me on the Monday night that the chances of her having escaped it were minimal. She phoned work and quarantined herself from the rest of the flat. She had no cough or breathing issues, but a slight temperature and sore throat meant she managed to get a test anyway and of course she'd managed to catch it. We're now two weeks down the line and she's fine, though a little tired. She's even back at work, so all's well that ends well, but having my kid diagnosed with Covid in a country I can't currently get into because of Covid restrictions, in the middle of my exams isn't my favourite pastime. Needless to say I have spent so much time on the phone over the last fortnight that I haven't even started Xmas shopping and cards are completely out the window. It was lovely to know Charlotte's Spanish mum (Sofia who she au pairs for every summer) was on standby to take care of her if she had got it bad. But Charlotte's a wee star and she managed to look after herself throughout, seemingly unfazed. As it was I think she's simply binged the entirety of Spanish Netflix in a fortnight.
And going forward, I guess she is now further down my worry list, which is nice!
When we lived in Scotland, we always bought our Xmas tree from Ikea. For a £25 tree, you got a £20 voucher to spend in Ikea, and my family can easily spend £20 in Ikea so the tree became the great annual £5 bargain. And when you are married to someone who grew up in a Scandinavian pine forest, mentioning the words 'artificial tree,' as probably still is the norm in Scotland, is tantamount to asking for a divorce!😂
Last year was our first year in Scandinavia. We're surrounded by Xmas tree farms - we have at least three within walking distance, so we intended to get one there. But we're faffers and somehow we overshot the deadline and they'd run out by the time we got round to it. We ended up buying the last remaining tree in Aldi, but it cost less than a tenner and was actually the prettiest one we'd ever got!
So, after two weeks of nagging from the girls, we decided to go and chop our own one down on Saturday. We found a little place just behind Léon and Anna's school where they were selling any tree you wanted for 100kr (£12). We had a look about and settled on one that looked just about the right height. 
I should have guessed back when he was a wee baby, exactly how his career was going to pan out...
Thomas was on the radio this morning about Brexit😊 Listen from 1 hour 09 minutes in.
Léon's first starring role on Danish national TV! It isn't so much his fifteen minutes of fame, as his 19 seconds😂
... or narrower still, Danish problems.
Now here's something I never in my wildest dreams thought would become a dilemma in my life, and no it's not global-pandemic-related. It's a flags versus fairy lights issue!
Before, when I lived in Scotland, the Xmas tree went up around Anna's birthday and came down just after Charlotte's. That was it on the Xmas-decorations front. Here in Denmark, or at least in our corner of Denmark, I've noticed Danes distinguish between Xmas decorations, such as your tree, which goes up mid-December till January 6, and winter garden decor which goes up around the end of October when the clocks change and stays up till around February. This kind of thing...
Last year I hadn't sussed the difference so took our garden lights down with the tree, but I'm now starting to realise that the garden lights are a winter hygge and happiness thing and not fully to do with Xmas.
One thing many of our neighbours had last year was flag Pole fairy lights. They look like this, (or you get them with vertical lights too):
The kids thought they were really cool and I promised I'd get us some this year which I have now done and intend to put them up this weekend. However, now I have them, I realise you need to clip them onto the flag hoist to get them up which means we can't use our flag until they come down again. The problem is that the main time Danes fly their flags is to celebrate family birthdays and five of the 7 of us have a birthday during the winter fairy lights season. Even if we cut it short, all three of my daughters' birthdays are between December 19 & January 11.
So do I need a second flag pole? How do Danes with Xmas birthdays cope?!
Yesterday I had my PD3 language exam. PD3 is the highest official Danish ministry exam set at the level you need to pass to obtain Danish citizenship and amongst other things to be able to practise as a doctor or dentist etc here as a foreigner. It's probably the first time I have sat an exam since I was 23 years old (as far as I can remember anyway). Obviously there are other requirements for citizenship too that will come with time but this is the language part anyway. Ideally, I would have preferred to sit it after being in Denmark a bit longer (which is more normal) but my passive Danish knowledge meant I was thrown in at the deep end in January and this was of course compounded by lockdown followed by two hours a day being knocked off our teaching schedule once we started back.
As a young woman, I found exams quite stressful. I'd be nervous, I'd find it hard to sleep, I'd worry and more. This exam should be a big deal for me as it is my only way back to the EU passport I'm about to be stripped of, very much against my will, and as far as I am concerned against my rights... How exactly is it that I can have my citizenship simply removed? Anyway, that's a different blog post so let's not go there for now.
I went to bed entirely unfazed on Monday night, I slept like a baby, other than the fact that I'd had to set my alarm slightly earlier in case the car park was full. Even when I turned over the first paper and found it way harder than any past paper I had done in class, there was simply no effect on my adrenalin.
So am I just a smug git who assumes I'll pass with flying colours? I have done reasonably well in my class work this term, so it could be construed as that, but the truth couldn't be further from the mark. The reason none of it stressed me is entirely different and very personal, probably not something anyone in the class (other perhaps than my friend Slava, who I mentioned it to very briefly once in the beginning) could guess.
The reason behind the new calm Phyllis is that two years ago, almost to the day, I was in a very different situation to the one I am in today. And that experience changed me and my outlook on what was important and what wasn't forever. It changed everything in my life. I'll put a link here as there's no point in typing the whole story up again, but the reality is that this exam doesn't matter. If I were to do badly, I could sit it again, or I could choose never to do it. Waiting to hear if I got 50% or less, 70% or more doesn't matter. Compared to the hell of waiting to hear if you are going to live long enough to see your kids grow up, how could it ever matter? Two years ago I remember sitting waiting for my phone to ring, knowing the person on the other end would be telling me if I would live or die and still I had the balls to answer that phone call and try to act casual as I awaited those results. Quite frankly, if you can do that, you can do anything. Every piece in the jigsaw puzzle that was my life fell into an entirely different place after that. Since then, life's priorities, life's goals and the way I approach things have entirely changed.
It is probably also one of the reasons I am here today, sitting this exam. I'm not sure pre-2018 Phyllis would have had the courage to restart her life from scratch but post-2018 Phyllis knows deep down what matters and what doesn't and moreover she knows she can do anything, as long as she has her health.
Tonight Scotland is attempting to reach an international tournament for the first time since 1998 (7 years before he was born). He's throwing everything at it, but the odds are predicting tears 🙄
I'd never heard of chestnut soup until I happened to mention in my language class last month that I had a chestnut tree and suddenly the Hungarian and Bulgarian girls were raving about it. So I came home, researched it and gave it a go. Strangely, it tastes almost like a really exotic cream of mushroom or similar - it definitely has that interesting foresty flavour. So I'm uploading my (extremely simple) recipe here so that next autumn, when I inevitably can't find the recipe online again, this will jog my memory. And for anyone that happens upon this - give it a try, it's lovely!
Ingredients
At the time everything passed in a whirlwind of madness. I was home alone parenting all the kids as Thomas had had to move before me. I was dealing with everything from selling the house, packing everything, dealing with the colossal emotional upheaval on the side of those who were being dragged away from the only home they had ever known and those who were being left behind. I wasn't even in the equation, as I had no mental energy left once I had dealt with everyone else. And when I think back on it now, I wonder how and where I found the strength from, given Thomas had to leave less than ten weeks after I got out of having surgery for a suspected cancerous ovarian tumour. I had literally been out of hospital four weeks (and was 'signed off work' till March) when we had to take the decision on whether or not to jump ship. I was either mad or I have some extra large balls.
Of course, I have moved internationally before, but that was before I was a real adult. Moving internationally as a student is easy and fun (or rather, it was easy and fun till the Tories got into power - it's about to be about as easy as cooking a slice of toast in a tumble drier...) but in my day at least moving about as a student was a wonderful adventure.
Moving abroad as a family is a thousand times more complex. As a home-owner, a lot depended on selling up back home, which we luckily managed to do though not for quite as much as we'd liked. You incur all sorts of house sale expenses which you hadn't been reckoning with, but that's not unexpected at least. Next you sell your cars, but when you're not buying a new one at the same garage, they have no incentive to give you a reasonable price and you have no time to look for private buyers so no matter what you do, you're inevitably going to be shafted on the car front.
Next, you start gathering quotes to move your possessions. These make your eyes water - literally! We were quoted £14K to move our house contents and I swore that if I had to carry each item on my back to Denmark on foot, I sure as hell wasn't paying £14K! We managed to get it down to about £6K by throwing out every piece of furniture we owned, moving only clothes, books, kitchen equipment and the odd family heirloom (which ironically Thomas had previously paid to ship to the UK!) We tried selling everything, of course, but time was short and most things were fairly used so we probably made less than £400 in total. £400 for a lifetime's possessions is kind of sad really. In the final weeks, I found that by offering things online for free, I at least didn't need to drive our possessions to the local rubbish dump and throw them out, which was quite soul-destroying. Owning nothing after all those years was strangely liberating. Of course, the things that were in too bad a state to sell or give away were invariably the things that were too large to dump, so most of the £400 profit went on bulk rubbish uplifts - typical! So by the end of the day we owned no house, no cars, no beds, no sofas, no tables, no chairs, no wardrobes, no garden tools, no bikes... the list of what we no longer owned was endless!
Many of the others who jumped ship at the same time had their removal expenses covered by their new employer. Thomas landed himself a wonderful job and we waken up grateful for that every day, but with a company that had not envisaged any international candidates and therefore with a zero budget for international removals. I imagine it'll be several years before we get over that hit too.
And on arrival here, we had to find a way to acquire all of that again. It will, of course, take some years to get back to where we were. Some things were a must - when your garden is 9000m2, prioritising something for grass-cutting goes without saying. Other things that we'd like, for example a bike for me in a country where cycling is the norm and where the lie of the land is almost flat enough that it might not actually kill me, has had to be punted into the long grass!
As with the UK, Denmark is based on a two-income system, so while I am learning Danish, which I had to pay for, we are trying to live on half what our contemporaries are living on. It'll be a while before we can jet off to Thailand for our summer fortnight. It feels as if we're constantly walking the tight-rope between sacrificing my earning ability so I can learn enough to fit in well enough to feel this is home, and giving up classes and job hunting before I can actually speak well enough to get the right kind of job for me. I'll admit the time I spend at my classes is great fun. You feel like you're connecting with the locals while simultaneously making international friends, but of course, the flipside is that feeling of guilt, that I really shouldn't be spending so much time on something that isn't a real job. When you land somewhere wholly alien to you, where you have no friends and no family and you've never really learned to communicate, language lessons are a lifeline. They are the three mornings a week where I actually see other human beings rather than rattling about entirely alone, listening to Danish radio in a fairly pathetic attempt to submerge myself in the lingo. They are a place of sanctuary, where you can actually say 'god, this is hard' and someone will invariably agree. A burden shared and all that... But there's a reason the average age in my class is late 20s. 90% of people just would never consider starting their life from scratch again after they turn 50.
When you reach my age, people tend to be settled in their lives, as we were back home. You have friends, maybe some family close by, you know the parents in your kids' schools, you have a job and colleagues, you have neighbours you know and trust. If you're lucky, a psycho government doesn't get voted in, burning down your house, threatening your livelihood, and toying with the notion of deporting your partner and forcing you to start life again from scratch. There are few opportunities to make new acquaintances at our age. The same is true here. Fifty-somethings in Denmark are no more in need of new friends than those back home. They certainly aren't in need of mates who struggle to express themselves and that's before you throw in a global pandemic so you can barely even introduce yourself to a neighbour, let alone seek out some way of meeting new people.
Another given in Denmark is that over 18s are self-sufficient. In Scotland parents are legally responsible for their kids who are in further education until they reach 25, or get a job. There is the odd loophole, of course... If your parent refuses to help you, you have to bring a court case against them to force their hand. So in real terms, when a student's parents are divorced, you often find the parent who had had the main custody of the child till 18 is left picking up a greater share of the bills (or in our case, all of them). Student rooms here are reasonably priced and students receive 'SU' - a grant, which is not means-tested on parental income, of £750 a month. And yes I do mean grant as opposed to loan. This is a wonderful way of making sure all kids get the same start in their further education. When the three little ones reach that age, I will be first to explain to them the wonderful advantage they have over their friends and family back home. They'll never take it for granted. Back home parental income is taken into account, there are no grants and student rooms are an eye-watering £700+ a month. Having jumped ship while Lots was still at uni, we therefore have a child who falls under Scottish jurisdiction, putting us at a further disadvantage against our Danish peers. But at least it is temporary, and things should begin to even out by 2024.
Moving country when you're middle-aged comes with some other annoyances - some minor, some major - we're too old to join any of the health or dental plans here so we're stuck with the basics, when the majority of our peers have had some scheme or other for years. Thomas had been a member of such a scheme when he worked here in his 20s, but left it when we settled down together. The result is that unlike our peers we have to pay full price for prescriptions, dental treatment and glasses. Doctor visits and hospital treatment are of course still free to us. My UK life insurance is no longer valid now I have no UK address but taking out a new policy in my fifties will be much more expensive than it would have been to continue paying into my old one, which was taken out when I was significantly younger. That is something we haven't been able to deal with as yet so I'm glad we're not in a Corona hotspot. However, the most obvious one which hasn't hit us yet but will to a certain extent devastate our 'twilight years' is the fact that, quite frankly, UK pensions are utter shit for the vast majority of people our age and worse still, we cannot rule out Brexit leading to such a collapse of the currency back home that the tiny pensions we will be receiving from back home when we reach our late 60s will be negligible. Realistically 70% at least of my pension and 50% of Thomas's will be UK based, so we'll be living on less than 50% of our contemporaries come retirement. Unlike our peers here in Denmark, we won't have the luxury of paying a mortgage past retirement. Our only option for survival will be to have paid off the house in full, some time in the next 15 years. Given I've already been paying my mortgage for over 27 years and we were a mere ten years from finishing our Scottish mortgage this setback is a bit depressing. Quite frankly this whole mortgage malarkey is getting a bit tedious!
Looking back over our relationship, most of this is the fault of Brexit. Had we decided many years ago that our plan was to settle in Denmark, we would have done things very differently... To name a few things - Thomas would have paid into his health plan so he could get subsidised dental etc treatment today. He would have continued to pay into his Danish pension rather than his UK one. I would have learned how to speak and write Danish over a decade rather than simply developing a decent passive knowledge of it, as I had. We would have started job hunting on a timescale that suited us, so we would have had time to sell our possessions, our cars, our house without losing out and we could have allowed ourselves the luxury of seeking out an employer for at least one of us who would have paid towards the international removal costs, even if a couple of years later we could then have sought out the type of job Thomas has now, that suits both his education and interests. And more than anything, from my perspective, we would have left sooner, when all the kids could have benefitted from the Danish higher education system, and could have been kept together. Having my family all based in the same country would have been a no-brainer.
So, given the negatives, do I think we made the right move? Absolutely! Every morning I still waken up relieved. I listen to the Danish radio news on my way into Odense in the morning and my heart is no longer in my mouth at the mention of Boris or Brexit. I can sleep at night, knowing whatever the UK government gets up to is unlikely to devastate my life. Looking forward I see that my kids are growing up somewhere open-minded, international, respected and cooperative. Here they are investing in educating the youth and even old people like me! Our government might have its faults but I haven't seen the EU or the US questioning its trustworthiness internationally over the last few weeks. Watching the UK's decline from afar is eye-watering. How could something so respected fall so far, so quickly? Yes, we are currently much worse off than our Danish counterparts and can never realistically dream of fully catching up with people here with an equivalent level of education, but at the same time we will still be in a much better situation than our UK contemporaries, so it is worth the uphill struggle. Learning to speak here, rather than just understand, as had been the case on visits to Denmark up till last year, gives me hope that one day I'll be able to find a job, make a friend or at least function here.
I'm living in a beautiful house. It cost less than our home in Newton Mearns, but if I were to transport it into East Ren brick by brick, it would easily set me back a seven figure sum. At home I could never have dreamed of owning a home like this. My kids' future is safer here and the older two still have the option to jump or even join us, using their French passport. I'm less than five years away from being able to apply for dual citizenship and therefore getting back the EU citizenship I never should have lost. Next month's exam will (hopefully) bring me one step closer to achieving that goal. Thomas has a wonderful job too. We may be no better off financially here in our new life than we were in Glasgow (at least not until I manage to master the language enough to contribute) but we have gained stability which was something we'd been lacking back home for the best part of a decade. Stability is a very undervalued quality that you don't fully realise you are missing, until you find it again. And who knows - there must be some company in Denmark who could use a English language expert with 29 years experience! Surely someone would like to make sure they never again make a single error when publishing the English-language side of their website or any literature pertaining to their company!? Pleeeeease!
