The barista is Swedish and cute and professes not to speak Danish and keeps muddling up the coffee orders.
He makes smoothies which promise to cure hangovers you never knew you had from a menu which includes confections of mint and spinach,sporting spritzy names like 'Sex Me Up' and 'Prince of Green.'
The former is
too much to contemplate after the Easyjet queues and mercifully turbulence –free,
flight into Kastrup airport.
The girl at the
next table is sucking on a 'Prince of Green': it's the colour of an explosion
in a pea factory. It's almost as green as those green M ohican up-dos which used
to project from the heads of punks on the King's Road, circa 1990.
I saw the
punks most mornings on my walk from the tube station at Sloane Square down to a
magazine where I worked near the wonderfully named World's End.
The punks would be hanging about near the no.11 bus stop, close to what is now the Saatchi Gallery. As the punks lounged and lolled about trying to exude an air of punkish menace, so the lurid neon spikes of their hair would wave about a bit, but only stiffly, like the spines on those rubber dinosaurs so beloved by my nephew, Sebastian.
Those punks
weren't really punks at all, just self-conscious cockerels: left-over parodies
of punks, long after punk had mutated and become something else entirely.
Joe and the
Juice, I learn, is a highly successful home grown chain. We begin to see the bars
everywhere we go, on our rambles through the city. The Danish answer to Eat or Pret A Manger I guess.
The windows
of this Joe and The Juice bar, overlook the Tivoli Gardens which the nifty
little Lonely Planet guidebook, Copenhagen Encounter, reckons are closed for Winter.
All I can see
of the fabled pleasure gardens is a gaudy sign and what looks like a giant grey
rock made of Styrofoam.
Nowhere in any
of this average February Tuesday, is there any sense of a city in shock or of people holding their breath after the Valentine's Day attacks in which, a mere
four days ago, two people were murdered by a 'terrorist' gunman subsequently named
as Omar Abdel Hamid el-Hussein,
a criminal loser who was himself killed in the shootout that
followed hours later.
Instead, all
is calm, all is quiet.
Just
then a police woman passes by the window with another officer. We can see they
are obviously, emphatically, showily
even, armed to the hilt. She, in particular, is hefting a sizeable automatic
weapon, large enough and deadly enough, I imagine, to blow a very big hole in
the juice bar. But unlikely to make much of dent in the schemes of all the
other nihilistic no-hopers and haters out there, eager to leave their own
personal mark on our otherwise ordinary days.
17.02.15
Copenhagen - a peaceful city
Frederiks Church, known as 'The Marble Church' Copenhagen |
Kastellet in the Chuchillparken, Copehangen |
The Stork Fountain, at the heart of Strøget's fashionable and bustling shopping district, Copenhagen |
Big bird and the Bikes! Strøget, Copenhagen |

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I Love the M3 |
The Good Workman |
No Nettles at Chelsea |
Blowing My Trumpet |
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Working From Home |
Day of the Bee, Part I |
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Rise & Shine! |
I Shrunk the Universe |
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