When I lived briefly in Denmark in the 1960s
– ten years before the birth of the present prime minister –
it was hardly on the geopolitical map, a small NATO country
composed of islands, a peninsula and alleged hygge –
remote and almost exotic to a sheltered Northern-Irishman.
It used to be quite a power – owning Norway,
Southern Sweden, Iceland, Schleswig-Holstein,
Northern Estonia, Coromandel* the Gold Coast
and some Caribbean islands for the slave trade.
Now only Greenland remains.
While I was enjoying myself on dreamy Bornholm
learning heterosex in candlelit hygge
and eating smørrebrød and kryddersild,
labskovs (known in Liverpool as scouse),
boiled cod fresh-landed and stikkelbærsgrød,
Danes were doing to Innu Greenlanders
what Russians are today doing to Ukrainians : snatching
native children to turn into Proper Danes
eating with knife and fork and being
hyggelige. The fork was invented
only a century after the Inuit arrived on the world's
largest island from the western continent.
Now Greenland is a Prize Territory and,
apart from the Faroe Islands, the only overseas part
of the ancient Kingdom of the dithering Prince.
I was brusquely dumped by my Danish girlfriend.
I have never had one since.
Nor been to Denmark.
 |
| We are all now familiar with Greenland's national flag. |
from Wikipedia:
Since 2025, the United States has engaged in hybrid warfare against Greenland;[30][31] as a result, the Danish Defence Intelligence Service included the United States as a potential hybrid threat to national security alongside Russia and China in its threat assessment that year.[32][33]
* So it may have been, as Osbert Sitwell wrote:
On the coast of Coromandel
dance they to the tunes of Handel.
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