WEST JUTLAND

I have spent the last couple of days at my wife's family's annual gathering (again no internet connection, hence no blog). Everybody was there this year, all 23 of us, accomodated in a large summer house in West Jutland.

Jutland is the part of Denmark that sticks up from Germany. Traditionally, it is the poor part of the country. The land is flat, particularly on the western side, and the soil is sandy, which makes agriculture difficult. In olden times it was mainly heath and pine forests. Standing on the current border between Germany and Denmark and looking at the pancake-flat, dyke-ridden landscape, it is hard to see why the Schleswig-Holstein question exercised so many minds for so long. To be blunt, who would want it?

Danish ingenuity has since solved the agricultural problem, so nowadays there are large fields of wheat and maize, herds of dairy cattle, and many of the country's large pig farms (see Gylle, 1/5/10). But ingenuity can't make the landscape any hillier. The roads in West Jutland are dead straight; after 10km, you come to a five degree kink, and there is a small village or town on the bend, often with an odd name. Tarm, Vemb, Tim, Borris. As you approach the North Sea, the trees forming the hedgerows bend in unison, victims of the westerly winds that blow pretty much all the year round. All in all, I find it pretty desolate, at least until you get to the coast.

It would also explain the area's reputation for having a particularly intense form of religious puritanism. The film Babette's Feast was set in West Jutland, with Karen Blixen poking gentle fun at the hypocrisy of the overly religious.

Today the region is hugely dependent on tourists, particularly Germans. The long, sandy beaches, with high dunes whipped up by the winds, attract windsurfers, families with children, cyclists and seabathers. They are housed in the modern-day version of fishermen's cottages, well-built and -furnished to (high) Danish standards. The house we stayed at had 18 beds (the spillover slept in a tent), an indoor swimming pool, sauna, and two jacuzzis, one outdoors.

The outlying parts of Denmark are finding it hard to keep their populations. Fishing, the mainstay of the coast in former times, has been in difficulties for years. Young people want to move to the cities, notably Copenhagen and Aarhus, in search of more excitement. And it is already difficult to attact (for instance) general practitioners to look after the health needs of the rapidly ageing people who remain. Without those German euros pouring into summer houses, those problems would be greater still.

Walter Blotscher