Page 17 of A Copenhagen Snowmance
“I have a friend who has access to somewhere special.” She huffs, not entertained by his mysteriousness. “Relax,” Jamie says. “You’ll like it.” Quite how he thinks he can make this statement, Anna has no idea, because he barely knows her.
Nyhavn, the colourfully painted old harbour, has always been one of her favourite places in the city. She has, on occasion, been known to sit at a table of one of the quayside restaurants for an entire afternoon, just because she loves the vibrancy and the history and the colours of the old buildings. But all that has been tarnished for her, now she knows Carl and Maiken would meet here. Hardly discreet and hardly worrying about being seen. Anna has, since the discovery of the affair and her dissection of all the signs she missed, felt certain locations in the city were, if not complicit in the subterfuge and betrayal, at least involved, and so she’s fastidiously stayed away.
“Have you been to the Tivoli procession?” she asks, her heart rate increasing as they get closer to the harbour.
“Aye. Last year.” His broad frame, just behind her, though not touching her, herds her along. She can’t turn and bolt home. She’d be met by his chest and she’d have no chance of getting through him.
“You don’t want to go again?” she tries.
“Not today,” he says. He is completely unbothered by her clearly being bothered. Infuriating man. She huffs again, frustrated.
“Need I remind you, Anna, that I won the rights to decide this evening. A wager you willingly entered into, of your own volition, quite keenly in fact, and so there really shouldn’t be any objection or push-back, from you, The Loser.” She resists the urge to stamp on his toes with her toasty boots.
They reach the bulwark end of the harbour basin, where the tour boats start and finish. She always advises visitors to Copenhagen to start with a canal tour, to get a feel of the city before they start their foot tours. The entire area is teeming with people, well wrapped up, hands clasped around cups of steaminggløggfrom the nearby stalls. Theair is heady with the spiced scent of the mulled wine. It’s pure Christmas.
“This way,” Jamie says, steering them not to the restaurant side to the left, but down the right-hand side, which leads to the cycle bridge.
“Are we heading to Reffen or Christianshavn?” she asks. Both the street food and entertainment island, and the old part of the city lie across the main harbour.
“Nope,” he says and then, “We’re. Here… Now.” He guides them through a cluster of people standing along the pavement and onto the gangplank of an old, moored boat. The wheelhouse roof carries both a thick snow layer and a festive weave of party lights, to charming effect. Anna feels her braced shoulders sink; she has no chance of resisting Nyhavn’s loveliness in the face of this.
There are numerous people milling around on the deck already and a man appears from inside, having spotted them. “James!Velkommen til.”
They shake ’n’ hug in that way men do, and Anna stands behind. The man looks to her. “And this is your guest.”
“Anna, Mikkel. Mikkel, Anna,” Jamie introduces.
Mikkel bids her welcome and tells them there’s a vat ofgløggfurther around the deck and they should help themselves to any of thesmåkagerthey’d like. Anna has never needed asking twice when it comes to cookies, Christmas or otherwise, and she leads them around the light-spun wheelhouse to the other side of the boat.
A roar from the crowd across on the other quayside draws them to the rail. They’re just in time to look down towards the mouth of the basin, where there on the water, a flotilla of lights has rounded the corner and is coming towards them. Hundreds of kayaks, all adorned with fairy lights, are floating up the quay through the dark, the kayakers wearing head torches, Santa hats and even more strings of fairy lights around their bodies, all reflecting in the ripples of the inky water. It isutterlymagical.
“Oh…” she sighs.
“Exactly,” Jamie concurs.
“I’ve written about it, but never actually been to one. It’s quite a new tradition. The one year we did try, we screwed up the timing and the crowd along the Christianshavn canal was so huge, we couldn’t see a thing.”We.Carl had been late home for some reason, and they’d simply arrived too late. That and, unlike some, they didn’t have a friend who had access to a boat in Nyhavn.
The flotilla glides to a halt, clustering together in a fairy-lit mass. From somewhere, a voice starts to sing, soon joined first by the other kayakers, and then from all three sides of the quay. Anna knows the carol by heart, so joining in is instinctive. The lights, the water, the unity of voice move her in a way she hasn’t experienced since she left. Mikkel appears, singing in a rich baritone, with cups ofgløggfor them both, hot and secretly hiding the rum-and-port-steeped raisins and almonds at the bottom. There’s a spoon handily placed in the cup to scoop them out, and Anna knows these are the bits that really get people drunk. Spirits by stealth. Jamie has tucked in already, but he doesn’t know the words to the carol, so fair enough. Mikkel has also left them a small paper bowl of cookies, and Anna snaffles herself abrunkage, a brittle brown disc with gingerbread-like flavours, a couple ofpebernødder, small, sweet biscuit nuggets, and avaniljekrans, a vanilla-spiced wreath, which she sticks her finger through and eats like that– just as she did as a kid.
As the song comes to an end, a huge cheer goes up, and the kayakers slowly negotiate their way to turn and extract themselves from the floating cluster, before heading back out of the harbour.
“Danes do like their singing,” Jamie notes.
“It’s integral to the national culture, I think.Fællessang.Not sure what you would call it– community singing, maybe? ‘United singing’. I honestly believe singing’s good for the soul, and coming together with others, strangers even, to sing together… well, I think it’s a cornerstone of our society and community. Danish society,” she corrects herself. It’s not her society anymore.
“I’ve been to a wedding here,” Jamie says. “The guests wrote songs for the wedding couple. Known melodies, personalised funny lyrics. Everyone really got into it.”
“Oh, yes, and not just weddings. Literallyanyparty. And during Covid there was dailyFællessangon the television throughout the lockdowns. It helped people feel less isolated. It’s a big thing. And tonight, it was beautiful.”
“Totally,” agrees Jamie. “Who’s glad they came out, now?”
“Shut it, MacDonald. Smugness is not pretty.”
“Where do they kayak to next, do you know?”
“Kayak Bar,” Anna replies, thinking of the canal-side bar near the parliament building, where she has spent many summer evenings drinking by the water. “I believe they normally serve cups of bouillabaisse and bread rolls tonight.”
“Fancy that for dinner?” asks Jamie.
