Mud On the Road: After A Shooting

At Copenhagen Central Station, still bleary from the 3 am start to Gatwick, we sit and drink ginger lattes and smoothies at a Joe and the Juice Bar overlooking Tivoli Gardens.

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 Mohican 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