CLOSE UP Video Interviews

Your correspondent and his spouse spent a wonderful two weeks in Denmark in May, most of it on a "workaway" vacation with a lovely family in the countryside near Gjøl, a small town on the northern coast of the Limfjord on the peninsula of northern Jutland. We have had a longstanding interest in visiting Scandinavia but confess that  two years of being hooked on the Danish television political drama "Borgen" piqued our particular interest in Denmark. It was no surprise that your correspondent didn't accidentally run into Sidse Babett Knudsen who played Denmark's first female prime minister Birgitte Nyborg nor Pilou Asbæk  who played Kasper Juul, a spin doctor, in the seriews. After all, your correspondent was  painting a 200 year old stone barn across the water and quite a ways from  Borgen (the Castle) as the Christiansborg Palace, the seat of the Danish Government in Copenhagen, Zeeland, is known, not that the actors who likely now have international reach would be hanging out at Borgen anyway! Politics came up  in this interview with a  Vigo  (a play on "we go"?) rideshare driver from Romania who was sympathetic with the truck drivers who were on strike and staging blockades (but not along our route to the airport for our flight back home) in a protest against government policy. But it is culture, history and nature that figure prominently into your correspondent's documentation of this beautiful, dynamic land of 6 million people, three quarters the population of New York City.  We are grateful to all our hosts, everyone who helped us find our way and all the people of Denmark. See some documentation below.

VIDEOS HERE

PHOTOS HERE

INSTAGRAM REELS HERE

On a six day visit to Bermuda, your correspondent became intrigued by the variety of accents.

On a ferry ride, a very zippy jet-powered ferry from Hamilton to the Royal Navy Dockyard, an elder ferry worker referred to his proper yet distinctive accent as “British Bermudian.” He distinguished it from the Queen's English and from a West Indian accent. Tongue-in-cheek, he attributed British Bermudian to the temperate sea breezes on the island, warmer than England and cooler than the West Indies.

Jean-Marie runs a “garden inn’ in Southampton and although our timing didn’t work out to stay there, we visited! She has a lilting accent from (warmer) Antigua. She married and settled with a Bermudian and settled here, but goes back to Antigua every year. A garden tour included the greenhouses full of smal,l green poinsettias which she imports as slips , feeds and grows, prunes back in September. In the following months she draws the curtains  to provide just the right amount of night darkness so that they turn brilliant red at Christmas. Unfortunately, two back-to-back hurricanes caused her to twice enlist neighbors and draft her sons to haul the plants into the house and back to the greenhouse; the salt mist blowing in the one semi-open side of the greenhouse could have “burned” the leaves brown and gotten into the potting soil.

At a lovely Airbnb, across the road where we stayed, the innkeeper’s partner, Danny, exhibited a British Bermudian accent, also. His heritage is very varied-including Scottish and Indian from India. Ironically, some of his family were originally settled in a more northern area of the island populated by Native Americans (American Indians) a legacy of the confusion attributed to Christopher Columbus in the 15th century who thought he had reached the east Indies. He recounted that the 300 year-old house was once a horse stable for an inn and brothel that had stood across the street; evidently it was popular with sailors on the then sparsely populated island!

Your correspondent also came upon other English accents- someone who spoke with a rather posh accent and yet another with more working class. Perhaps most surprising was the “Bermudian” accent that was American! Robert’s English family, whose genealogy he has been documenting (3000 individuals so far), has been on the island for a few hundred years. A grandmother may have spoken with an English accent, he recalls, but recent generations like his have been sent to boarding school beginning at age twelve following through with university in the States.

Actor and activist Robert Weick stars in the one man show “Marx in Soho,” based on the fantastical conceit that Karl Marx bargains with the authorities in the afterlife to come back to America to explain his ideas, call for peace and justice and clear his name . Your correspondent had a chance to speak with Weick during a rehearsal of David Auburn’s Proof” in which he portrayed a brilliant but mentally off-balance math professor. The play was written by noted social historian Howard Zinn who, as Weick encapsulates, writes about history through the eyes of ordinary people, slaves, Native Americans and other oppressed peoples who come together, take to the streets and work to effect social change. Weick became friends in 2005 with Zinn, who died in 2010, through collaboration on a national tour of the play and undertook another extensive tour of “Marx” in the U.S. and UK in 2018 to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth. For more information and booking inquiries visit marxinsoho.org Watch video interview here