How do you protect yourself from the heat?” “With factor 15,” the blind man replied, “and a pina colada.” You can’t concoct a love of the hearth without a chill wind. The hack was moaning like some southern cissy because his contact lenses had frozen on to his eyeballs, and Sven said: “At least you can protect yourself from the cold. It reminded me of an exchange I overheard in the Arctic Circle, between a Swedish sled driver and a travel journalist from the Daily Telegraph. The valorisation of the cold is possibly the most distinctive feature of the region, and certainly the least exportable.
“It is a practice as old as sitting around a fire or sharing food with a friend.” Hygge practices are, broadly, things that we do that our ancestors would recognise besides lighting fires, eating, drinking, eating cake and drinking things that are hot. No, really, though: who does that? And “by lighting fires almost every day”. Thomsen Brits, in a self-described “beautiful little book”, which reliably delivers small pages and an incredibly large font, lists some of the things that give us a feeling of hygge “We hygger” – with an R it becomes an intransitive verb – first thing in the morning “when we light a candle at our breakfast table”. Its baldest definition is “cosiness”, but that expands, according to The Book of Hygge by Louisa Thomsen Brits, to cover “a feeling of belonging and warmth, a moment of comfort and contentment.” “Hygge” sounds from the outside like a meme to allow hipsters to grow old: a Danish mode of being, it has no single, literal translation, which is only to be expected, as it is the source of the Danes’ singular happiness and could only be a wraparound concept.
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