The Great Escape Part VII: Back in Black

Being back in Copenhagen didn't feel so wonderful

Part I: Maladjusted
Part II: Adjusted for Inflation
Part III: Drifting

Part IV: A Merry Dance

Part V: Out of the Frying Pan 

Part VI: Into the Firing Line

We worked in a dank and almost lightless ground floor office in the same building as the Danish newspaper that had published the infamous Mohammed cartoons. As such, me and a couple of my colleagues at The Copenhagen Post wondered, sometimes out loud, when the jihadis would run in and empty their assault rifles into the lot of us.  Perhaps they would just slit our throats – after all there was no security and nothing to prevent anyone from doing such a thing. Were we being paranoid?

My job was to do the layout for the newspaper. I was given an old 486 PC which ran at the speed of treacle and a desk in the corner next to the cupboard where the cleaning equipment was kept. Nobody spoke. There was a strange atmosphere, and I just kept my head down and got on with the work.

Being poor was no fun. There is, I soon realized, no such thing as genteel poverty if you have been thrust into the situation. When you have no money everything is complicated and nothing is possible. We lived at Michelle’s mother’s house in the top room, and I felt like I was always unwelcome. I borrowed a cranky old bike to get to work on, and when it broke down I had to get the Metro. On these sleek driverless trains the passengers, all fashion and icy coolness, would be listening to their MP3 players silently and I reflected how reverse this was to the loud and warm life in Spain I had become accustomed to.

Each month I got paid and each month it only just covered the mortgage and bills in Spain, with a few lonely crowns left jingling in my pocket. The mortgage rate kept going up as Spanish banks struggled to stem their losses, but at least I wasn’t getting further into debt. Michelle had found a job as a cleaner for the local council, cleaning schools, old people’s homes and the public toilets down on the beach. It wasn’t much but the combined incomes meant we could start to save up for the deposit to rent a flat by ourselves.

Being broke for a long period of time can take its toll on relationships. Bickering and full blown arguments can happen without any warning at all. When you are broke with no hope of being unbroken any time soon, you make up little promises to yourself. Mine were coffee and wine. I could afford, on average, three coffees from the self-vending machines in 7-11 per week. These I would drink down at the harbour with a friend and pour my heart out in breaks from work. Wine, I would buy by the box and stow under the bed, knocking back a couple of glasses each evening - sometimes more - after the kids were asleep, and looking out of the window at Danish suburbia and marvelling at the strange ways in which fate works.

As such, I can now never begrudge people who have hit hard times their petty addictions. Without them, many of us would go crazy.

The people at work were generally sympathetic when I explained that I was utterly skint, but how could any of them really know what it felt like? I went from living my ideal life, with an eight bedroom farmhouse and land, to living in a poky room in a house I wasn’t welcome in and in a job that was downright draining.

After a while things picked up a bit. We applied to the council for assistance and were allocated a subsidised flat near the airport – the flat we are still in five years later and where I am typing this. It was great to have our own flat but we had nothing to put in it and there wasn’t even any furniture. So I set about scavenging stuff that other people had thrown out and in less than a month we had quite a comfortable apartment with all the regular furniture and gadgets – all of it for free. 

After a few months in the job we moved offices. It was only upstairs but at least it was a modern office with light. It was, in fact, the office where the Mohammed cartoons had been commissioned from (i.e the culture editor Flemming Rose’s old office) and nobody else wanted to rent it. My job began to get more interesting. I started writing restaurant reviews – primarily because I could have a decent meal out without having to pay for it. Copenhagen was riding on a wave of haute cuisine because of the explosion of interest in Nordic food epitomised by the restaurant Noma, and I dined out in high style as often as I could, returning home to write up my notes in the wee hours.

I also wrote about the arts, in particular opera and ballet. I didn’t know anything about either of these things but I just read what other reviewers had written, went to see the performance and then put my own spin on it. It was enjoyably fraudulent and, again, it broke the monotony of being without money by way of mental stimulation. I also did a few movie reviews, sometimes taking the opportunity of having an entire cinema almost all to myself to take a nap.

A few months later I was promoted to the position of copy editor. The journalists, most of whom were American submitted their articles to me and I edited them and laid them out in the paper. Furthermore, I was given the task of writing features, and keeping a watchful eye on the chin-wagging diplomatic community. This last thing I hated. It seemed to me to be an endless charade of tea parties, launch events and charity meals, and the end of it all the various diplomats just wanted to see their face in the paper. 

I also went to crime scenes, photographing the spilled blood and bullet casings. There was an upsurge in gang-related shootings at the time, so this was a particularly easy gig. I discovered that if you had a big enough camera, wore a moleskin jacket and looked serious, the police would always let you in behind the cordon without asking who you were.

But the big thing that I knew was surfacing on the horizon – and which scant few other people seemed to know about – was the fact that in December the following year all eyes would be on Copenhagen as it played host to the COP15 climate conference, widely billed as the last chance saloon to find a solution to the inaction on climate change policy.

I was excited by the prospect and was eager to be involved in a newspaper associated with the event. Nobody shared my enthusiasm – that is nobody except an Irish journalist named Katie Rice, who was about 13 years my junior. Katie was a real pro. She interviewed all the various famous people that seemed to either end up at our office or invited us to theirs, ranging from several Nobel Prize winners to, er, Rick Astley. I knew instinctively that if I could get Katie on my side for any potential newspaper then it would be a success. Is it turned out, my feelings were entirely justified. 

We were both, in fact, embroiled in a saga concerning the whereabouts of Denmark’s most wanted man; a man known as Amdi Petersen who had set up what is usually referred to as a cult and then done a runner from Danish justice. We received information of his supposed whereabouts and became embroiled in a saga involving Interpol and (allegedly) the Danish secret service attempting to intercept him in (Third World) Country X – and which I really dare not go any further in mentioning here …

After this, I knew Katie was the person I needed most to make the climate conference newspaper work.

In the spring of the following year the editor of the newspaper had a nervous breakdown and walked out of the office. The CEO (for that is what he called himself) asked me if I would step into his shoes as editor and I said ‘Yes’. 

Working at a newspaper is always interesting. You get to meet all kinds of people and do all sorts of things. When I think back, one of the key moments that sticks out in my mind was meeting the Dalai Lama at an expensive hotel in the city centre one Sunday morning. Perhaps because of my bad situation I had fallen back on reading various books related to Buddhism, so getting to meet and shake the hand of such a man as the Dalai Lama was a great inspiration for me.

Another person I met was the US environmentalist Bill McKibben. It was another case of serendipity as I had just that day finished reading his book Economics as if People Mattered (I think it goes by a different title in the US) when I found out he was in town. In fact, it turned out, he was just up the road from our office, giving a talk in an old chapel. I jumped on my bike and got there just before he started his talk.

He spoke about the coming COP15 climate conference and how important it was that successful talks ensued. He is a great orator, and there is something of the Sunday school teacher about him. He spoke with passion and conviction, but I could see he was disappointed with the turnout – there can’t have been more than 20 of us.

At the end he asked if there were any questions. A Danish journo put his hand up and asked why any of us should be bothered about climate change and wouldn’t it mean we can grow wine here? McKibibben rolled out what was probably his standard answer and moved onto the next, who wanted to know what good it would do for anyone to adapt their behaviour in the almost certain knowledge that most other people will not.

McKibben was getting a bit fed up by this point. Perhaps he had jet lag. He informed us in urgent tones that ‘The weight of expectation is on your [Copenhageners’] shoulders. It’s a heavy burden but you must be strong.’ 

I think I heard a snigger. Maybe I was imagining it. The fact of the matter was that Copenhageners for the most part had no idea that a climate conference was coming to town. Of those that did, they could be divided neatly into two categories: those who were worried about unruly foreigners protesting in the squeaky clean streets, and those who wanted to make a lot of money out of it. Otherwise, to most people, it was simply a plaudit and smug confirmation that Copenhagen had ‘arrived’ on the international scene.

Afterwards I had a short chat with him, explaining that I had had the idea of making an independent newspaper during the conference to act as an unofficial platform for ideas and writers. He thought it would be a great idea, so I decided there and then to press on with it. Furthermore, he wanted ideas about doing some kind of visual stunt to draw attention to the upcoming climate conference for his organisation 350.org (350 being the maximum number of CO2 molecules per million in the atmosphere that NASA man James Hansen deemed ‘safe’). I said that Copenhagen had a lot of cyclists, perhaps we could all cycle around the City Hall Square and spell out ‘350’ with our bike lights. There would be thousands of us, I said, it will be on a live feed around the world.

On the day though, it was difficult to get people interested. Climate conference? Heh? Nobody was cycling and the weather was wet and grey. Instead a few passers-by were persuaded to stand in a 350 formation. So much for needing security barriers! It was an omen for the climate conference itself.

All this time we were still without money. We had enough to live off, shopping at the cheapest supermarkets and getting stuff that others had thrown away or no longer wanted, but that was about it. Our house in Spain still hung as if by a thread, with the threat of a single missed payment meaning likely foreclosure. Occasionally I wondered whether this might be an option, but soon came to my senses when I realised that this would likely mean an entire lifetime of debt and a lack of options. I vowed to do anything  could to keep our house from being repossessed. A Buddhist would say just let go. I said no way José.

A few weeks later we moved out of our swanky mid-city office and into a cheaper one. The paper was not doing too well financially (same old story) and we had to save money. We all moved into an old slaughterhouse in the long-abandoned Kødbyen district (‘meat city’), situated in the red light district. 

As it turns out, it was just in time. In the US, the FBI had uncovered a plot by Al Qaeda to blow up our old office with a truck bomb. Seems like I had a lucky escape, again.

I told the boss I was going to make a climate conference daily newspaper using the staff and the office. 

“No you are not!” Was his reply. “You’ll bankrupt the entire newspaper with your ideas, like you did with the last one!”

“Trust me,” I said. "I think I know what I'm doing."

The Great Escape Part VI: Into The Firing Line

The first issue of The Olive Press

If you are still reading this - well done! You're one of the few who hasn't cut their RSS in disgust. In any case, I promise this is leading up to something that is relevant to the stated aims of this blog.

You can read the other parts by clicking on the links below:

Part I: Maladjusted
Part II: Adjusted for Inflation
Part III: Drifting

Part IV: A Merry Dance

Part V: Out of the Frying Pan

One does not simply move to Spain. In fact it took about nine months of planning and several visits roaming around Andalucía, but by September we were installed in a 500-year-old stone house in a small village perched on the side of a mountain in the most backward part of Spain’s most backward province. We also had a new baby with us, Sofia, and it got so cold in the house during the following winter that we all had to wear several sweaters and gather around the fire every evening just like people must have done for the previous half millennium.

Nobody yet had a mobile phone in the village – there was no point because there was no signal – so instead they stood on their roofs and shouted to one another. In the crisp winter air, scented by olive wood smoke, and looking around at the surrounding snow-capped peaks, I felt like I had arrived in paradise.

We had, again, been able to exploit the property bubble, and our house in Denmark being worth more than when we had bought it (largely thanks to the City deciding to build a metro station next to it and redeveloping the beach area into something that wouldn’t look out of place in Miami) – so we had some leeway to get settled. Property in Spain was cheap – not as cheap as it had been but still very cheap by northern European standards. This was especially so of crooked 500-year-old piles of stone in out-of-the-way villages where nobody spoke English.

Our plan was to live in the small village house until we could find an old ruin on a bit of viable land, which we would then build up into a liveable house and embark on a path of low impact living where we would live until the end of our days. The reasons for doing this were primarily environmental ones – I wanted to walk my talk and hop off the consumer treadmill – but I was also convinced that it would provide a good place for bringing up children, in contrast to what they would experience in rich, highly industrialised northern Europe.

I got into living in Spain like a fish slipping into water. It almost felt like a kind of homecoming and most days I had to rub my eyes to check it wasn’t all some kind of dream.  We had moved to La Alpujarra, a collection of valleys and villages between mountains just to the south of Granada and just to the north of the Tropical Coast. The region had been populated by the Islamic Moors in the 16^th century after they were expelled from Granada, and not an awful lot had changed since then (apart from the people, of course). The economy was mainly agrarian and the farmers were all small scale. Old traditions hung on – like the matanza (pig slaughtering festivals), a belief in the duende , or spirit, of flamenco – and nobody had ever heard of an iPhone.

But even in paradise, alas, one must earn a living. I was fortunate enough to be offered a job in an estate agent’s office in Orgiva, the main town. I took it. The job involved driving around the region and photographing properties and putting together a website for rentals. The boss was a louche and sleazy Englishman with a lisp and it wasn’t long before I realized he was crooked and was never going to pay me.

I quit after a month (again, never having been paid a cent). I was moaning about what a scoundrel this boss was to Mary, a young woman from Yorkshire who also worked there, and she heartily agreed. She went on to say that herself and her husband, who had taken to wandering alone in the mountains for days at a time, had planned to start a local newspaper. I said I thought it was a good idea.

One day soon after I had a day at leisure in my village and decided it would be a great idea to walk to the summit of the mountain. Mulhacen is the highest mountain in Iberia and it seemed like a good use of a day. I drove part way up and then walked the last few hours. As I was trekking across the boulder-strewn upper slopes I happened to round a summit of sorts and was able to look out for miles and miles across the southern littoral of Spain and out across the Mediterranean. What I saw shocked me because, despite it being only late Autumn the entire seaboard seemed to be covered in white snow. I squinted at it, trying to look more closely, and could make out delicate filigree patterns in the surface of the white stuff and then I suddenly realized what I was looking at.

It was a shrink-wrapped landscape, smothered in white plastic greenhouses as far as the eye could see. I had read about them, sucking up the dwindling groundwater and replacing it with pesticides and fertilizer – just to provide cheap salad to the supermarkets of northern Europe. 

I hiked further up to the summit, marvelling at the beauty around me but perturbed by what I had seen. By the time I made it down again, late in the evening, I knew what I was going to do. I was going to start a newspaper and draw attention to this landscape-eating monster which was clearly spreading towards La Alpujarra where it would no doubt consume and kill the area. I considered that it might just be a hopeless gesture, but nevertheless I wanted to do something within my power to try and stop it spreading into La Alpujarra and destroying the unique and rich biodiversity. 

Plastic greenhouses spreading across the land in Almeria, Spain

That newspaper, when it appeared, was called The Olive Press. I started it with Mary’s husband, who was eventually coaxed down from his Wordsworthian wanderings. It started off as a local community newspaper, aimed to appeal to the sizeable population of beatniks, hippies, renunciants, New Agers and general misfits who lived in the area. I thought that if we drummed up enough interest in the various environmental abuses going on in the region then it might wake up the sleepy Spaniards, who seemed to be turning a blind eye to all of it. 

We had an office, recently vacated by a lawyer who had gone missing (signs of a fight were there in the kicked in door and abandoned volumes of law), a few desks and supermarket-bought computers, a receptionist and a husky (similarly rescued from said supermarket). Mark, Mary’s husband, said he was a journalist. I didn’t have a clue but taught myself how to design a newspaper with QuarkXpress For Dummies – and we were away.

The newspaper, on its first print run, was very popular. We timed its release to coincide with the local market day and I watched, agog, as people walked around the streets reading it. I even saw Chris Stewart – the person whose book had led me to move to Spain – walking past with a copy (later, he wrote articles for it). We drove it all over the region, delivering it to every inconsequential village we could find. In short, it was a great debut. 

But the thing about newspapers is that you can never rest. Work was frenetic. I did the graphic design, acted as commissioning editor, accountant, features editor, proofreader, restaurant reviewer and distributor. Every week I went out to meet and interview interesting people who were doing interesting environmental things. I met some inspirational people and got to see a lot of Andalucia, which was like a universe in its diversity and its richness. I felt like my whole life had been building up to working in this role.

At the same time as we were working on the newspaper, my wife and I also bought an old ruined farmhouse on a hill called Cerro Negro (‘the Black Hill’) and set about making it habitable. This was to take some two years of hard work just to get comfortable and, being off grid, I had a very sharp learning curve ahead of me fitting all the solar PV, the water system, sewage system and all the other crucial systems that most of us take for granted.

If, before, I had considered I was living in paradise, now I was sure of it. On the land were numerous trees, including oranges, lemons, grapefuits, olives, pomegranates, apples, pears, peaches, figs and many, many almonds.  The land was very fertile and irrigation came from a stream which ran directly from the melting snows at the top of the mountain. Situated up a very poor unsurfaced road we never got any passing traffic and the peace was absolute.

I had found my paradise and now I would have been happy to live out the rest of my days there in rustic simplicity, living ‘away’ from civilization but being very much a part of the local community, cultivating great food and genuine friends and having all the time in the world to cherish and educate my two young daughters. I had found peace and happiness and , what’s more, I had found it at a relatively young age.

Our farmhouse and smallholding on Cerro Negro

*** Fast forward by two years ***

If, God forbid, one day I should die and go to Heaven and St Peter or someone like that is there to tell me what I did right in my life and what I did wrong (tip of the hat to Kurt Vonnegut), I’d imagine that he’d say starting The Olive Press was the one good thing I did. Without going into too many details about what was achieved (that would take an entire book which, by the way, I have actually written and is sitting on a USB stick in my drawer in case anyone is interested to read it – and, yes, I did find a publisher for it after a long search but they said ‘Take out the dull bits,’ meaning the bits about peak oil and wider environmental concerns and I said ‘Sorry, I can’t’.). 

Among its more noteworthy achievements was acting as a catalyst to stop a disastrous golf course being constructed on a UNESCO site by shadowy rich investors. The battle turned into a war of attrition, with one of the supporters on our side, hispanophile writer Alistair Boyd (aka Lord Kilmarnock) actually dying, with the stress of being hit by a 1 million euro lawsuit perhaps being a contributory factor.

The paper was also heavily involved in a scandal involving MP Margaret Moran - one of Tony Blair’s ‘babes’ and, coincidentally, a neighbour of mine-  who had been bullying our newspaper delivery man, and in the resulting conflagration she sued the paper (and lost). This turned out to be one of the first inklings of the UK parliamentary expenses scandal which was a major contributory factor in the downfall of New Labour.

In the end the whole newspaper saga was a firsthand lesson for me in the corrupting influence of money and how it can warp and muffle honest reporting. The original newspaper, as I had planned it, was too local and perhaps too radical to earn enough money to pay the staff. Thus it had to be expanded outside of its original geographical area, into regions where people were not so, well, enlightened. Sales people became involved and bigger advertisers were attracted, who naturally insisted we tone down the editorial so as not to scare the ‘clients’, and desist from putting pictures of mangled and abused animals on the cover. And from my point of view it was difficult to write an editorial about the perils of global warming when on the facing page we had placed a full page advert showing cheap fares for British Airways.

It wasn’t just the advertisers complaining. My business partner too was unhappy with the 'green' label and said he was unhappy being considered ‘a fucking tree-hugger’. Instead he wanted to take the paper more upmarket to attract a wealthier readership - abandoning the original readership in the process. Articles about expensive organic wine were okay, by this way of thinking, but not ‘far out’ ones about the local anarchist community building their own school. Given this uncomfortable state of affairs it wasn’t long before I found myself unwelcome my own office and the paper began its descent first into schizophrenic please-everyone sensationalism and then into celebrity obsessed lowest-common-denominator hackery and faux moral outrage over inconsequential matters, which is where it rests today. 

To cap it all, after all the time, effort and money I poured into it, I ended up penniless and working on a building site to make ends meet. I had to sell my stake in the newspaper and tried to put the whole thing behind me, but the legal ramifications and costs went on for month, if not years, afterwards. Later my business partner simply disappeared, leaving unpaid debts, and our names were displayed on a kind of wall-of-shame in a public place in Granada City. 

The financial crisis hit at the same moment, meaning we couldn’t sell our little village house and were left with a mortgage that needed paying every month. Our life in paradise had rapidly taken a hellish detour and my wife buckled under the financial pressure and almost suffered a nervous breakdown. Eventually she went back to Denmark with the children to try and find work. When they left I felt like an utter failure.

The paper itself was taken over by Jon Clark, a London Fleet Street journalist who had been the ‘Show business Editor’ of the Daily Mail. I got on fine with Jon, who lived in an opulent mansion at a secret address near Ronda (secret, because so many people were after him, not least the desperado family of a local serial killer he had written a book about). Jon was also the first journalist on the scene of the infamous Madeleine McCann case, in which a toddler was abducted in nearby Portugal, and has used The Olive Press as a platform for reporting suspected sightings and other developments in the case ever since. 

There were countless other battles and controversies, proving that a little paper could have a lot of bite. In the early days it was known as a campaigning newspaper, always at the centre of things and getting into trouble by confronting power. Indeed, in 2008 the newspaper was honoured with the Spanish ‘Beacon of Hope’ award for its environmental campaigning (of which there was plenty), so we must have been doing something right.

If, by now, you’re imagining me now as some kind of fearless paladin in shining armour with my trusty sword of valour and a shield of integrity, please cast aside those thoughts immediately. Think of me more as a Bilbo Baggins type character – all I wanted to do was have a fairly quiet life with a local community-based newspaper, Yes, I wanted to draw attention to the menace of the plastic greenhouses - but I had no interest in making a name for myself by taking on British MPs, Russian development consortia or murderous Spanish gangster politicians. Indeed, the fear of thugs coming round to my remote farmhouse in the middle of the night and exacting revenge on me and my family was quite a real one. No, the honour for that lies squarely with Jon Clarke, who either has large cojones or a small brain, or quite possibly a mixture of the two

I was left behind at our house without my family for some months desperately trying to earn enough money to stop our house being repossessed. Some similarly penniless friends moved in with me and brought their kids too and, although it was nice having company, it felt like I was a guest in my own home. They also brought with them chickens, goats and even a donkey.

I worked as a labourer down on the coast, mixing concrete by day and learning skills that will be useful in the future. Leon, my friend and the one I was working for, built ‘organic’ buildings, using plenty of hand moulded plaster, rocks, wood and other natural materials. He taught me that building a house is not all that difficult if you know what you are doing and are willing to spend plenty of time on it rather than going for the industrial indentikit style of building. 

Apart from my income from laboring I tried to sell the produce from the smallholding -but the prices were so low that it wasn’t even worth the petrol money to drive them to market. Thus I left thousands of the juiciest organic oranges and lemons imaginable rot on the ground. 

I did manage to sell the grapefruits, which were popular with foreigners, and I also secured a bizarre online night-time job where I was part of a global 24 hour team writing reports about real-time acts of violence around the world. These reports were then conveyed to wealthy clients who had ‘interests’ in the places where these things were happening. That’s how I learned that at every minute of every day, someone somewhere is dying in a hail of bullets or being hacked to bits with machetes – usually in out-of-the-way countries that don’t make the news but where business concerns lie.

But the money I earned wasn’t enough to pay the mortgage, and what’s more, I missed my family. It was a low point, and when my wife phoned and said she had saved some money for me to come and visit in Denmark, I jumped at the chance.

I flew there one Spring evening approaching my 37^th birthday. In the airport I picked up a copy of The Copenhagen Post, Denmark’s only newspaper in English. In it there was a job for a graphic designer to do the layout using DTP software. I had experience of this and so applied for the job, getting an interview two days hence. At the interview I was offered the job as long as I was able to start the following week. Thus I hastily got back on the plane and returned to Spain. I spent a day packing what I considered to be valuable into our tiny Renault Twingo car, borrowed 50 euros off a friend to add to my 150 euros that was all I had to my name, and set off on the three day drive to Denmark.

As I left, a storm was breaking over the mountains and, glancing back I saw a rainbow over the hillside where our house was. I had poured my life, my dreams and the rest of our money into that house, and never had considered we would leave it behind – but here I was. I vowed to return to Spain. It was a defiant vow and one I intend to keep.

I drove to Denmark at 80km/hr to save fuel and made it after three days with barely any petrol left in the tank and no money at all in my wallet. Along the way I had slept in the car and, once, at a free campsite in France and had only a loaf of heavy home-made bread to eat along the way. I was miserable the whole way, but at least I would be seeing my family again.

I did the last leg from the middle of France to Copenhagen without stopping, driving for almost 20 hours without a break and arriving in Denmark at breakfast time on a Sunday morning.  I pulled up outside my mother-in-law’s house, where my family were being put up in the spare room, and rang the doorbell. Footsteps approached the door and it opened. I was let in without a word. There would be a period of shame to pass through, that much was clear.

We were homeless and without money, our dreams shattered and our life in Spain aborted. There was no sympathy for our plight, quite the opposite, in fact, because if you dare to live your dreams you can expect to face the consequences when they go wrong. But at least I had a job and my health, and we were a family again. I sat on the bed in our shared room and hugged my kids, who were full of joy that I had returned. And then I fell into a deep sleep.

Thus began the toughest three years of my life.                   

The Great Escape Part V: Out of the Frying Pan

And so we moved to Denmark ...

My story is proceeding apace now and I plan to publish three more posts, leading up to an announcement on Christmas Day.

Part I
Part II
Part III

Part IV

I got on a ferry at Harwich in England on September 12 , 2001, with most of our worldly possessions packed into a van. On the overnight crossing to Denmark people crowded around the TV screen in one of the restaurants watching news unfold of the happenings in the US. The mood was tense, fearful – how would America lash out? What blood price would be demanded?

On Danish soil I drove the van to Copenhagen and Michelle’s brother’s apartment, which we were borrowing for six months while he was away. The same week, the prime minister of Denmark called a snap election, hoping to ride into another four years in office using the fear factor derived from what was going on in the US. It was a gamble that failed dramatically and decades of social liberalism vanished overnight as the ironically-named Venstre party (meaning ‘left’ – although they might more accurately be described as ‘right’) took office with coalition partner the popular nationalist Danish People’s Party, who vowed to make life for foreigners a whole lot tougher.

But despite all the charged rhetoric I enjoyed  my first few months living in Denmark. I signed up to learn the language at school while I hunted for a job. When it seemed that there were no jobs to be had by foreigners who didn’t speak the language (which could take several years to learn, I was told) I decided to bide my time and study. I chose to do a long-distance Msc. in Environmental Policy and Philosophy, thinking perhaps that I might be able to get a job in something that was more in line with my professed values.

During that time Michelle’s elderly grandfather, who had been a resistance fighter against the Nazis in occupied Denmark, slipped on some ice outside the supermarket and bumped his head. At first he seemed fine, but then he suddenly developed swelling on the brain and died. Given that we would soon be without a place to live (and there was no rental market in Denmark at the time) we bought his house off Michelle’s mother and aunt.

It was a medium sized terraced house on a busy road but with a nice back garden. Situated next to the airport, it had been used by the Nazis as a barracks during the war, although this fact was more of a curiosity and I couldn’t detect any lingering sense of evil.

I immediately dug over the back garden, creating an area to grow vegetables, and also dug out a pond to attract wildlife. It was great having a small parcel of land to call my own for the first time and I grew as much as I could in the space that we had. What’s more, we renovated the house, knocking down walls and putting in a modern kitchen. It wasn’t a bad place to live.

My course proceeded and I continued to find it enlightening and interesting. I was sent core texts by some of the original deep thinkers on ecology and ethics: Henry Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, Albert Schweitzer, Rachel Carson, to name but a few, and I became sold on the concept of biocentrism i.e putting the biosphere at the centre of our ethical considerations rather than ourselves.

Towards the end of it I went on a residency at Reading University in England with some of my fellow students. Perhaps expecting them to be there for similar motives to me I was surprised to find out that I was the only one doing the course for personal education and fulfilment. Nearly all of the others were there on behalf of the PR departments for the big companies they worked for, learning new material for their 

greenwashing activities. One woman said she did her coursework on the ship she worked on, scanning the Gulf of Mexico for new oil deposits. She might have worked for BP, I can’t remember.  Another man said he his job was to worry about emissions from the engines his company, Rolls Royce, manufactured. He didn’t have to actually do anything, he explained, aside from worry about the problem and understand the issues in case anybody enquired. 

I still have the course material on my shelf. Plucking a book off, Environmental Ethics (by Joseph De Jardins), I can see that I highlighted a section of text on one page that must have appealed to me as I read it. It says:

We seem to lack the language for expressing intrinsic value. Many people think that such value is merely subjective, a matter of personal opinion: “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Thus, when a measurable instrumental value (such as profit) conflicts with intangible and elusive intrinsic value (such as the beauty of a wilderness), the instrumental value too often wins by default.

After a year my course finished and I gained a distinction – something that I had never achieved before - but I still couldn’t get a job. To make matters worse I seemed to be suffering from some form of malaise that had come over me two years before when I had got sick travelling in the tropics. It was getting steadily worse and after a while I began to convince myself that I had some form of parasite growing inside me.

Various visits to the doctor, who initially thought I was imagining it, yielded nothing. I used the internet to do research and became even more convinced that I had picked up something nasty. I could feel things moving around in me in the night – and not just my stomach but my chest area too. I developed blinding headaches, lethargy and general malaise. My hands started trembling and my sight dimmed in my left eye.

I kept booking appointments with the doctor and was referred from one to another, all of whom insisted there was nothing wrong with me. I think I went to the doctor and various specialists literally dozens of times. I had blood tests regularly and was told at one point that I should start eating meat (I had been a vegetarian since working with animals in Guatemala). I began to think there was something seriously wrong with me but the doctor, who had found out I had been using the internet and was unimpressed (to say the least) that I should question medical authority, referred me for psychiatric counselling.  This was my first taste of the Danish Janteloven: ‘Do not think you are cleverer than us’.

By now we were expecting our first child. I really didn’t know what to do about my worsening condition and so, half-desperate, I got on a plane for England, went straight to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and asked to see someone who could help me. I had brought a sleeping bag with me, fully intending not to leave until someone had given me a thorough check. 

I was lucky, and within a few hours I was being probed and questioned by one of the world’s best parasitologists. Blood tests were taken, as well as various other samples, and sent off to a specialist lab in Thailand for analysis. Within a week I had a call from the specialist who told me that his hunch had been right and that I had contracted a parasite that, if left untreated, would kill me. I was to get myself to hospital immediately, he said.

In Copenhagen’s austere Rigshospitalet the young doctor was eager to see me. “Congratulations,” he said, a little too excitedly “you’re Denmark’s first case of gnathostomeisis.”

“I like to be unique,” was my meek reply.

The gnathostoma parasite incubates in the flesh of pigs and is easily transmitted to humans through water infected with pig faeces, some of which I must have drunk – or perhaps it was the one-off burger I had eaten? It grows in the human gut and begins to roam around the body, munching away at will through tissues. Often it will follow neural pathways and end up in the brain, where it will eat away contended as the victim goes crazy and dies screaming in agony.  Sometimes it will appear under the skin and it can be removed with a scalpel, assuming the doctor can catch it as they can move quite fast.

The doctor clearly didn’t want this to happen to me and hopped in his car and drove to Germany, where he purchased some pills for me to take. Many different types of medicine (and food) were not available in Denmark, so this was very generous of him.

After popping a couple of pills I felt much better and made a full recovery, although I maintain that I suffered some permanent nerve damage. The numerous other people around the world who contract this are not so lucky, but the parasite doesn’t get much mention, perhaps because it tends to affect people with no money in the Third World. Incidentally, the condition is rare in Denmark because a) Danes tend not to eat local food when they go abroad (much less drink from streams, which I had done) and b) Third World immigrants to Denmark tend to be from Islamic countries where the consumption of pork (which is usually the transmitting vector) is forbidden.

Gnathostoma worms: nasty critters

In the spring of 2003 our first daughter, Jasmine, was born. Suddenly I was a father, with all the joys and responsibility that brings with it. But what kind of father was I when I couldn’t even get a job? I was desperate by now, applying for anything. I walked around Copenhagen, enquiring after bar work, cafe work, truck loading work ... anything. But nowhere would have me. Eventually I struck lucky and  managed to get a job as a cleaner, and thus I started the worst job I have ever had or am ever likely to have.

I had to get up before dawn every weekday and drive out to the concrete wasteland of a suburb where I would have to pick up my boss. He was a morbidly obese man who smoked a lot and farted and spoke not a word of English. Then I had to drive to a huge soulless area of apartments used to house asylum seekers from various Middle Eastern countries.

My boss hated them, said they were devils and parasites. In fact he was full of casual anti-Muslim sentiment and warned me that they would spit on me from their balconies while I was cleaning the steps in the stairwells, which was my job. When we got there I would sweep and then mop the staircases while my boss stood around pointing at bits I had missed with his fat cigarette hand, occasionally going away to buy slices of pizza which he would then guzzle noisily, making filthy jokes about the ham toppings and Muslims. 

Nobody spat on me, but I did endure plenty of insults from the teenage boys who hung around smoking and kicking balls in the stairwells, and, once, when I spoke to a little girl, asking her what her name was, a door opened and her father pulled her inside, giving me a fierce look that said ‘back off’.

It was such a depressing place. I had heard the boast of people saying that Denmark took in asylum seekers and treated them well, but here was the reality: families crammed into dark apartment blocks and given no opportunities to exist outside of them, all the while enduring the taunts and casual racism of the locals. I only lasted a month and was refused my pay, with the boss saying I had to work a month in hand to earn pay. I considered going to his office and lobbing a brick through the window, but then remembered that I was now a father, and fathers weren’t supposed to do things that would likely land them in prison.

I spent a few more months of job hunting, also writing a science fiction book. The book was aimed at kids, although with practically every adult having read Harry Potter I knew who I was really aiming it at. It featured a boy in Copenhagen who falls into the icy harbour and ends up on another planet populated by space age Maya. 

It was execrable. I sent it off to over a hundred agents and publishers and got rejection slips from most of them. It was no good, I had to find a proper job.

I found one in the form of taxi driver. Not a petrol powered taxi but a muscle powered one. I spent the summer trundling around the streets of Copenhagen in a rickshaw with my fares. Usually they were tourists, but sometimes they were businessmen. One day a German woman got on and said ‘Take me to the soul of the city.’ That’s when I realized that Copenhagen wasn’t the kind of city that had a soul. Nice architecture, happening bars, cosy restaurants, pretty funfairs and a great bicycle path network – it had all of these things, but I was darned if I could show somebody its soul.

I quit the bike taxi job. Most days I hardly made the rental fee (we had to rent the bicycle rickshaws from the company) and I was coming home completely exhausted from the effort. I began to give up hope of ever finding a job in Denmark.

My new degree, it turned out, was useless in finding me a job as well. I had hoped I might be able to get work at the European Environment Agency, which was headquartered in Copenhagen, but when I enquired about vacancies they told me there were only ten employees and no new posts were on the horizon.

Instead, I went to Prague and trained as an English teacher. I lived on a boat on the river for a month, doing the high-pressure course. Bizarrely, during the first week, we were made to learn Welsh. The idea was to teach us how difficult learning a language could be, but I suspected it was just a sop to the course director's friend, who happened to be Welsh. I practiced teaching English to Czech people in the evenings. The Czech Republic was overrun with American business consultants at the time and it was a big task training up the citizens so that they could be communicated with.

I came back to Denmark exhausted but at least I had a diploma in my back pocket that could be used to get a job. Amazingly, I managed to get one within a few weeks, teaching business English to professionals. At first I was very nervous but after a while I became less so as the material became familiar. I didn’t enjoy it, but by now I was resigned to the idea that work was not supposed to be rewarding or enjoyable, so I did it anyway. 

But then even that job disappeared and I was left at home again looking after the baby while Michelle worked as a kindergarten assistant. I wrote another book. This time it was a dystopian story set in the middle of this century in a world bent out of shape by war, global warming and uncontrollable technology. The central character was a clone exiled on a Mediterranean island with all the other unwanted genetic freaks created in lab experiments. In a word, it was bleak.

I was quite proud of the book. It was much better than my first one but still the rejections slips came back through the post one after the other until they formed a thick pile on my desk. I felt depressed. It seemed that everything I tried was destined to fail. 

It had been three years of unemployment. As a non-working foreigner in Denmark I had no rights and no way to claim any benefit from the system. I felt unwelcome and was at a loss as to where to turn. Every day I scanned hundreds of job adverts and every day the jobs on offer made me further depressed. Most of them involved working at one of a handful of giant companies involved in biotech or engineering or technology – this is the way Denmark earns its money. 

That Christmas, as the grey rain beat down outside and the television was blaring out its endless cry for us to consume more and be entertained more. I picked up a paperback book I had bought. It was written by a man called Chris Stewart – the former drummer of the band Genesis – and it detailed how he had escaped the greed and hubris of Thatcher’s Britain in the 1980s, moving into a ruined farmhouse in Spain’s Andalucía region, and becoming a shepherd. The book was called Driving Over Lemons and I read its powerful spell in a single sitting. 

When I finished  I put down the book and turned to Michelle, who was pregnant with our second child. 

“Let’s move to Spain, buy a farm and live self-sufficient lives in the mountains among people who really know how to enjoy life and where our kids won’t have to grow up with all this consumerist bullshit.”

“Okay,” she said.

And so we did.