I went to Copenhagen to see my friend the scientist, a very lovely person who spends her days locked in mortal combat with a fire- breathing microscope the size of a house. Apart from her, and her quantum dots, some of my favourite things in Copenhagen are: 

The piles of dirty snow filed away in neat mountains on street corners and ignored, while here we would be very excited and most disrupted by it. The trains which have exactly the right number of seats for the well- behaved commuters. The mummies in the museum, dug out of their quiet bogs but maintaining a dignified and deathly silence in their glass boxes. The surrounding busy city where the fashions evidently have not changed so much in millennia; 1st and 21st century Danish people share a love of well-cut neutrals and leather boots with ribbons, and that makes one think deep thoughts, about mortality, and neo- rustic styling.

More than those things, I liked the flocks of modest and merry little houses, multicoloured and decorated with windmills, weathercocks and lacy fretwork. Underneath the shadows of factories and tall trees, they looked loved and determinedly bright. They had attitude.