“I’m just using this because my own bike was stolen. The tires have no air. It’s not really a bike. Nice idea but they are ... fucking shit,” he said.
He smiles.
They even swear, here, in delightful fashion, all sing-songy and stripped of intent. He makes the phrase sound like something else entirely, perhaps a complicated anchovy dish.
Also, the stands are hard to find. There are meant to be 120 of them throughout the city, but I only came across about four, most of them emptied this hot day of bikes. Fine, if you must, and a nice idea for tourists, but I went back to the hotel and rented a real bike, about £15 for the day and there was a world of difference.
Within 20 minutes, I’d traveled kilometers — all the way along Sogade and Gronningen to the Kastellet and, beyond it, the Little Mermaid. Which was thronged with tourists and left me, frankly, a little indifferent.
Far more impressive, I thought personally, was Suste Bonnen’s Merman and his Seven Sons, an entirely underwater sculpture in the canal near Hojbro Plads. The wake from passing boats stirs the light to make the bronze-green children seem to swim in the depths below.
Being able, now, to lock the bike, I had to hop off for the first of the day’s 18 delightful coffees. A few, here, still bother with those wriggly centipede locks, and D-locks, and chain their bikes to trees or the plethora of stands (there’s even a stand at the airport, filled with 150 bikes). Far, far more users simply rely on the so-called O-lock, the fixment the size of a small hand which swings down from behind the saddle and slots in half a second between spokes on the rear wheel. Fast and cleanly efficient, and most of those I spoke to said bike thefts had gone down in recent years, partly, they say, because everybody now has one. Even if they were stolen in the first place.
This overall triumph, this cyclist’s heaven, could only happen to such an extent in perhaps a handful of cities. Copenhagen’s flatness has been crucial and a general friendly tolerance pervades the people, and perhaps that’s much easier to exude when you are all extremely rich and beautiful and well-fed and surrounded by nature and boats and medieval magnificence. The political vision has been forced through with determination to thumpingly obvious success and shows what could be, for some, the future.
I could have cycled round Copenhagen seven times that day, if it hadn’t been for all the coffees. My legs already feel better and you can see, easily, what it does for the Scandanavians’ toning. I was tempted, the next day, to leave the city and go north. The map told me I could have reached Elsinore. I just couldn’t, for the life of me, make up my mind.
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