Dear friends

I usually start the Christmas letter with small appetizers, but this is a bit difficult for me this year, where both the course of the year and therefore also the Christmas letter was marked by my father's illness and death. This is of course a purely family matter, so if there's any year you should skip reading, it's probably this year. I write these Christmas letters primarily as diaries for myself. However, quite a few of you have had contact with my father, who was a local public figure, so for some, this Christmas letter may be of interest even though it's not really about him, but about my own experiences with him throughout the year.

Another of the year's great “experiences” for me is just not exciting reading for you either, namely the last half of my historic 1200 km race from the North Sea to the Bay of Bothnia and from Skagen to the Elbe, although I should mention that this has been a race ONLY for my Christmas letter readers. But for me it was a personal victory and effort of will to be able to complete something that no one else has done before or will ever be able to do (explanation to follow!) and which was my own original idea and on my own initiative in mostly dark, rainy and freezing solitude. Everything else in my life has been something others have initiated.

Dear yearbook.... old friends .... as well as weak, peeping souls

This year's Christmas letter usually starts with one of your Christmas letters dropping through the letterbox and it suddenly dawns on me that it's time to start writing myself. This year Marius' was the first. I'll never understand how you, along with Torben, Virtus and Peter Frederiksen, are always so on top of things that you get something like this done before Christmas - if I didn't remember how you were the same people in class who were always on time with your essay submissions. Because a Christmas letter is something you write at Christmas - to escape from family and the Christmas rush - and not in the middle of summer vacation. Have you never understood that? Then you have a chance to get it out in time for the New Year and to include ALL the year's experiences and not just the summer vacation. But when I choose to mention you by name, it's more to praise you for your loyalty over the years. Most of the rest of you only manage a Christmas letter every 5 or 10 years at most. And it's a bit sad that you have to walk around for 5-10 years in fear and uncertainty about whether your old friends have died. Fortunately, a number of you have now got e-mail, which I take advantage of by sending out a few letters during the year. If these are sufficiently provocative - such as my article on the EU elections - many of you respond angrily and I breathe a sigh of relief at the thought that you are alive. If the email comes back with the message that the recipient is not known, I then embark on a major detective work to find out if you no longer exist on the non-virtual plane either. Usually you've simply changed provider, but especially when it comes to my American friends, it almost always means a huge amount of work and expensive phone money to track them down again, as there is no population register in their ungodly country. So remember to send an e-mail about a change of address.

I'll try to be a little brief this year - mostly because it doesn't seem to me that there is anything particularly exciting to report in this year that was marked by the loss of my father. He was still with us on New Year's Eve as we jumped into the new millennium together, and Vibeke's first smoke-free year (scared by the amount of cancer in the family). January was filled with a whole series of lectures at high schools. At some of them, I had a TV crew from DK-4 with me, who are doing a report about me - probably also for TV-2. They are very nice to have with you everywhere, Theis and Charlotte, - yes, Theis takes it EVERYWHERE so literally that he often follows me with the camera all the way into the toilets before he realizes that he's gone too far into my privacy. Charlotte was one of the people I traveled with in Bolivia and frequently shared the joys of the table and the night with. She was so moved by the sight of Bolivia's many starving dogs that I helped her in the night hours to chop some of the abundance from the sumptuous royal tables for distribution among the dogs and children in the streets. They were also there when I had a show at my father's old high school in Roskilde where he had just celebrated his 60th anniversary. The county high school is located in the old buildings of Katedralskolen and judging by the reactions and all the emails I got from the students afterwards, it must be the best high school in Denmark. It's a pleasure to deal with such dedicated students, many of whom showed up in larger or smaller groups for many of my subsequent shows all over Zealand in the time afterwards - or even in two cases arranged shows for me in their own villages. But only a few days later I was at Herlev high school, where it was pretty much like punching a duvet. Theis, who tried his best to film the non-response, was so outraged by the students' lack of reaction that he went around and interviewed them: “Well, why aren't you responding? What's wrong with you?” Unlike Theis, I've long since gotten used to the fact that you can have a whole string of apparent successes and then suddenly have a show where the reactions are inexplicably so superficial that you feel the whole world collapsing beneath you.

While Vibeke was on a romantic trip to Venice with her old boyfriend Ole, I ended the January tour with a show for a world Jewish congress at the Mosaic Center in Copenhagen. But what a hassle to get all the equipment through all their security measures! Jews have always been my best supporters, and it was exciting to hear from the Israelis I had at the table during the subsequent kosher dinner how they too could see the parallels between Palestine/Israel and the racist divide in the US and Europe. I have always been an active friend of both Israel and the Palestinians, but I must confess that I'm losing patience with the Israeli master race hustler lately.

Strangely enough, I flew straight from the Jews in Copenhagen to a similar Jewish center in New York the next day. So head over heels that I hadn't brought enough equipment and during the performance had to send Theis and Charlotte out into the streets of New York to buy slides and equipment. Fortunately, these two sweet tormentors had followed me across the Atlantic now that I finally needed them. And since I don't like being filmed when I'm tired and jet-lagged, I had a convenient excuse to get rid of them. My agent Muwwakkil had come to New York to see my new Millennium edition of the show and we had dinner together afterwards. Theis and Charlotte had been resentful on my behalf about some of the aggressive emails Muwwakkil had sent me in Denmark, but now that we met, they also thought he was very sweet. He lives in a small room in his family's house in extreme poverty and a mess that all my fellow Danish travelers say looks worse than the worst of my pictures. But as I always say, if I wouldn't support black business, who would? The new version of the show about the problems of the ghetto also spoke very strongly to Muwwakkil and made him realize that the show is more relevant than ever. My tour in February was also characterized as the most hectic in living memory. I had no less than 33 shows in 33 days in 33 states! Since these were criss-crossing the country - often with 5000 km in between - I mostly slept on airplanes spread out like Arafat on three airplane seats. Unfortunately, Theis and Charlotte's finances didn't allow them to follow me everywhere. So they rented cars to meet me when I landed at universities near New York, unfortunately in the most boring schools without much in the way of a TV show. So they decided to try again in February 2001, as I couldn't bring them on the fall tour as they had hoped.

Otherwise, there was nothing exciting about the tour. Despite various plane crashes and cancellations due to snowstorms, I still made it every day - often at the last minute. But how stressful when I was usually up at 4am every morning after only three hours of sleep to have to fight in desperate queues with all my boxes to get on an alternative flight. The only exciting show was at Arizona State University, as Arizona's largest newspaper had made it big with one of my Ku Klux Klan pictures on the front page. This meant that a lot of people came to the show, but since the Klan is very strong in Arizona, the authorities feared for my life and had ordered two police officers to protect me wherever I went. Even when I was in the restroom, one of them went in with me. Amidst the stress, there were a few relaxing days in California and Florida to visit old friends.

This added to my stress in Los Angeles, where I had to choose between staying with two old boyfriends, one a social worker and Jewish, the other a lawyer and of Greek descent. They had both organized shows for me on opposite ends of the country in the past, but now, by the will of the gods and a mysterious coincidence of circumstances in the middle of this huge city, they had ended up working in the same small charitable health clinic for the poor. I knew I couldn't live with one without hurting the other. I chose the Greek, Kristen, when I stayed with Mimi last year. But Kristen was still a little hurt that I didn't “show interest in her work” by going to meet her coworkers, as she was visibly and justifiably proud - partly due to the influence of American Pictures - to have gone from a highly paid lawyer position in Hollywood to an almost “voluntary” job as a fundraiser for the poor. Specifically, she had gone from a salary of $1.35 million a year to $300,000. So I should have shown her work a little more respect! But the other one, Mimi, I have just as much respect for. She only wants to work directly with people (in need) and refuses to deal with computers. But this fact just made it easier for me to deselect her. Quite a few of my close friends can now sit behind the screen and follow my movements around the country on my Internet calendar of upcoming lectures. And woe betide me if they find out that I'm going to their city and don't come and visit them! Everyone wants to believe that they are “the one” and have frequently prepared a big reception or party or bring friends to my shows without me even announcing my arrival. Yes, with the Internet, I am really starting to become a prisoner of my past!

This was also true in Florida, where in my rental van I barely had time to visit just one of my friends. And since Linda, the girl in the red dress with the oil lamp you remember from the show, is usually in jail or on crack, she probably wouldn't find out that I had been in Florida. Time was also too short to seek out the problems of the ghetto, so I chose wealth over poverty and visited Tommy, known as the playboy millionaire in the book. For him, money multiplies without him lifting a finger. Now he was even richer with a luxury home near Orlando. This was a wonderful place to relax under the palm trees by their lake after saying goodbye to my freezing pursuers, Theis and Charlotte, in the snow up in Pennsylvania that morning.

But just then Vibeke, Lalou and my mother-in-law came to visit me in New York and it was a bit sad we couldn't meet over here in my other life when Vibeke and Lalou were there for the first time in 9 years. However, we did have quite a few phone conversations. Every night I called them from a different state and the last night, when I had a show in Virginia - which seems almost around the corner in the US - I was about to drive the 5 hours up to New York to say goodbye to them, but gave up when I had to catch a flight to Arkansas in the morning. In Wisconsin, another Danish Vibeke had organized a show for 26,000 kroner. That's a lot of money to get out of a Catholic school, so sometimes I get a little help from the Danish exchange students who have previously seen the show in Danish high schools. Due to the many air shows, I didn't have any Danes on the trip, but in the last few days I did manage to get some driving around New York. I had flown all night from Oregon and had been picked up by a limousine to show far out on Long Island in the morning. So only by letting my black uniformed limo driver drive by was I able to pick up the Dane at JFK airport. If the person had any idea that I worked for the poor in the US, she might have made eyes at being picked up by me sitting in the back of a 10 meter long white limousine with an almost living room-like interior. But a whisky from the liquor cabinet quickly loosened her up during the drive.

Our son Daniel hitchhiking in the USA.... and Morocco

But the greatest joy was getting my son, Daniel, on the very last days of the spring tour. He had worked for a few months last fall as a freelancer and had gone to Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand just after New Year to travel around. But when he came home after a few months, he had grown so fond of traveling that he wanted to go to America too. When I couldn't take him immediately because of my flights, he got impatient and hitchhiked to Berlin. But now he was here. The first few days he slept with me in the car. Otherwise, he wanted to be on his own and not stay with my friends, like in Christina's luxury apartment. He definitely started at the bottom and slept in the strangest places with people he met during his nightly graffiti forays. One night he almost got arrested in Harlem - not for painting graffiti, which is considered petty in the ghetto, but because the police thought he was selling drugs. What else would a white guy be doing up there? Otherwise, he lived off various odd jobs, including being a nude model and having to stand for hours in one session holding hands with two older women in front of a large group of artists. Several of his friends came over to visit them, but even with them, Daniel could barely bring himself to go to a restaurant. He's incredibly frugal and his friends came home and reported how he was getting thinner and thinner. Throughout this year of traveling, we noticed that his bank book kept saying the same thing. He learned many of my old hobo tricks on his own, such as walking backwards into movie theaters to avoid paying the expensive ticket. If anyone claims that he is following in my footsteps, it is definitely genetic. I don't think I ever encouraged him in that direction.
 

After three months in New York, he wanted to hitchhike around America despite all the warnings from the Americans that he would be killed, raped, etc. Even I warned him, as America is not what it was in the 70s. However, he followed my advice to paint a sign like mine with “Touring USA from Denmark” and headed west. His destination was California, but when we hadn't heard from him for a week, we parents started to get a little anxious. My dad just laughed teasingly: “And you say that? How do you think mom and I felt when we didn't hear from you for three months at a time?” But I had given Daniel my phone card, so he had no excuse not to call home. Finally, he did call when he had just arrived in Sacramento. Yes, the trip had been tough, 8 days with little sleep and a lot of attempted assaults from sex-crazed men just as I had warned. We sensed that there was something he didn't want to come clean about and suggested he go to my old girlfriend, Marly, in San Francisco, who is a psychiatrist (she was mentioned extensively in the 25th anniversary letter). He did, and we discreetly e-mailed her every day to see if she thought he had been psychologically damaged by the experiences. But she immediately reported back that he was as mentally healthy as anyone - “far healthier than his father had been in the years she had known him.” Daniel sat through the dinners and entertained the family about his experiences at length - their younger daughter in particular was listening intently. But so did Marly, because - as she said - for her it was like reliving a bit of her youth. She pulled out all her old pictures from when she and I had hitchhiked around and made a living fishing things out of garbage cans. Every night she would sit and interview Daniel late into the night, telling him about how his father and her had once done the same things. Marly is still an extremely active person and dragged Daniel and her own children around to all sorts of activities. So his time with her was his best on the whole American trip, he later declared.

After a week, he had to hitchhike back when his visa expired. And the return trip was even worse than the trip out. One truck driver tried to rape him and he had to flee into the prairie darkness. When he sneaked back to the truck later that night to try to get his stuff, he couldn't resist taking a picture of the sleeping fat driver lying stark naked.

Then there was an hour-long interview with Daniel on DR program 1, where he talked very nicely about the experience and where DR posted this and other of his pictures on their website. From the trucks' computers he sent us several emails during the trip, after which I sent thank you emails to the drivers to pick him up. Finally, in New York State, he was arrested by the police and was furious that they had confiscated his camera. He got it back after a long hitchhike. But where I really gained respect for him was when he made it all the way to Newark Airport in New Jersey, just a few miles from Manhattan. In this hell of a spaghetti road, I would have often given up and taken a bus the rest of the way. But no, Daniel didn't waste money. He stayed standing for full or half days until he got hitchhiked all the way to Manhattan. And he was only 20 years old, while I was 24 when I first started. Maybe age makes you a little more comfortable!

We were looking forward to bringing Daniel home. But no. It wasn't more than a few days before he was on the road again. After all, as he said, you can't spend some of your savings after only six months of traveling. He took his girlfriend Sara with him and together they hitchhiked all summer in Germany, Holland, France and England, sleeping in parks and in stairwells. In the radio broadcast, Daniel waxed philosophical about how amazing it is to sleep under people's stairs and listen to the sounds of their houses. In Hyde Park, they slept under the bushes for a whole week before the mounted park police kicked them out. Little Filipino Sara's Danish adoptive parents were a little apprehensive, but they made it home - at 4am the night before her first day of high school. But soon after, Daniel was on the road again. After the radio broadcast and his enthusiastic stories, his friends were now lining up to hitchhike with him. I think he was in Berlin three times with different people. Simon hitchhiked with him to Barcelona and Ibiza just a week before Daniel's cousin's confirmation. Simon himself took the plane home, while Daniel came hitchhiking - just a few hours before the confirmation, which he had been told he had to be home for. And Magnus hitchhiked with him in the autumn darkness in Sweden, but took the train home himself.

As I write this - a few days before Christmas - Daniel is hitchhiking around Morocco, from where he tells one terrifying story after another about assaults, extortion, kidnappings by shady men, blackmail attempts from naked beautiful women, etc. But when he finally realizes that he is traveling without money - well, he also experiences incredible hospitality that makes it all worthwhile, with sumptuous nightly Ramadan meals and staying with family members in crowded living rooms with screaming kids. He makes it a point to immerse himself in the people's way of life, including starving himself throughout the day during Ramadan. His next destination is Japan. Yes, because you can't get any further east. All our Russian-savvy friends like Maria Tetzlaff warn him about the attacks in today's Wild East. “Well, then I'll just go via Iran and Afghanistan,” he replies. But it's my impression that he learns a lot from it. On our previous vacations, I could never get him to look at a map and he had no idea where he was. Eastern Europe bored him back then while he loved Italy's lively campsites. Now he's obsessed with looking at maps and if there's anyone he's fallen in love with, it's Eastern Europeans. Everywhere he goes, Romanian, Polish, Russian and Turkish drivers are picking him up and being nice to him. While Western Europeans have become “selfish and corrupted by their wealth” and, in short, “ghettoize” him as a hitchhiker. So it's not surprising that he seeks what he perceives as Eastern European warmth and humanity. Unlike my experiences in the 70s, he has the same deep criticism of Americans today as he does of Western Europeans. But we probably have something in common in that it's through hitchhiking that we have begun to take an interest in “the underdog.” It's too early to say whether his interest will translate into political engagement, but I'm happy to say that he has started reading newspapers.

We are also happy that he - unlike most of today's boys - now wants to go to college - the factor that certainly helped get me started as a young man. Several of my friends among the crisis-ridden folk high school principals have actively tried to recruit him, but unfortunately he has chosen the only one that has enough students, Holbæk Folk High School. When I see in my work how happy the students are to be at a folk high school, where they get some grounding and self-understanding in an increasingly career-oriented and confused world, it makes me so sad to see how most young people just rush into technical and IT programs without getting any of the inspiration that is so important for creative thinking and development in such subjects. You should really make a stronger attempt to persuade your children to take such a Grundtvigian pause for thought, I think.

After this mention of Daniel's hitchhiking, I ask myself - and many of you probably will too - if this is the proud father speaking here. To this I would say both yes and no. No in the sense that you are proud that someone can accomplish something that seems difficult to you or if someone has overcome severe handicaps to be able to do it. But as an old hitchhiker, hitchhiking seems as easy and natural to me as driving a car. And few parents are justifiably proud that their children can drive a car. But at the same time, I have to say a resounding YES, as I know full well that hitchhiking today is not as easy as when I hitchhiked. Back then, we hitchhikers were carried forward by a belief in humanity and the future that made us indomitable. At the same time, Daniel is far more than myself what I defined as a true “vagabond” - someone who not only moves from A to B but who hitchhikes in the third dimension: giving himself to the individual human being without thinking about exploiting their situation in some higher cause by photographing or describing them. But above all, the difficulties today are so great that I know I would have given up quickly myself. The crime rate in the US is more than twice as high as it was back then, which means that people lock themselves up in fear and only very rarely invite Daniel home, while I, for example, never in 5 years and 220,000 km of hitchhiking experienced sleeping outdoors for a single night (except one night by a gold miner's fire in the mountains, which was, after all, being invited into his home). In my opinion, it's easy to hitchhike and go through some rough treatment on the road when you know there's human warmth just around the corner. So how long would I have hitchhiked “in the age of aquarius” if it wasn't a daily lottery of love in which at least every tenth driver was a woman who almost as often invited me home to a warm bed. For the same reason, I never found it particularly exciting to hitchhike in Europe, where I was rarely invited home. But today, no women dare to pick up hitchhikers in the US and apart from a few “dirty old women”, Daniel had no such exalted lottery winnings (although he encountered as much male sexual aggression as I did) - although he has no trouble getting female attention.

Under the circumstances, I really have to take my hat off in admiration for the courage (to overcome himself and all the bloodcurdlingly terrifying warnings the Americans had given him in advance about hitchhiking) and the tenacity and resilience Daniel displayed on the very country road where I had hitchhiked with him as a two-year-old - an experience he still vaguely claims to remember. Funnily enough, he used almost the same expression to describe the experience as I remember using at the time: “You have no idea how beautiful an experience it is to stand all night in the middle of the prairie with lightning in the distance while waiting for a ride (with your son on your arm).” His visual memory is phenomenal, I discovered in New York, where he could always remember how to get from one place to another - even though he was only 12 when he was last there.


 

And me? From hitchhiker to long-distance runner

When Daniel came home from the US in June, we had a small party to which many of my Christmas letter recipients were invited. Partly to celebrate Daniel's 10,000 km hitchhiking in the US and partly to celebrate my own little “historical” record at home as the first person in Danish history to run dry-shod through Denmark from the North Sea to the Baltic Sea and from Skagen to the Elbe in one lecture season. I mentioned this crazy goal in last year's Christmas letter and yes - six months later I can now easily see how crazy a project it was. But I'm still a little proud that I had some of my son's persistence to make it happen. But first and foremost, I was surprised that - apart from the outermost stretches in Schleswig-Holstein and Blekinge - I was able to complete it as a true environmental race - meaning that all the routes I completed had to be close to places where I gave lectures anyway, so I could avoid unnecessary driving. The only place where this didn't work was the stretch from Sæby to Skagen, as you Skagboers are so uncultured that you've never invited me as a speaker! But in some places it was really hard to get the puzzle together and I had to run longer distances than I could really handle.

.
 

One of the worst was from Blåvand lighthouse to Esbjerg, which turned out to be 42 km due to long detours (due to a ban on running on highways) - a full marathon. A marathon can be bad enough, but this was done in solitude on a cold winter day in icy sleet and a strong gale, so already after 5 kilometers I was completely soaked. When I realized how far it was, I was tempted to split the distance into two running days. But there was no dear mother as I had no more lectures in West Jutland for the rest of the spring. Worst of all, the unforeseen long distance forced me to run fast as I had to reach my lecture for CARE in Esbjerg in the evening. Fortunately, CARE's employee Helle Lühne was staying at a hotel, so I could get a much-needed hot shower before the show, which wasn't always the case during this winter's “running” lectures. And when I then saw two of you old classmates in the audience, Torben and Jens Oluf, it warmed me up so much that I completely forgot about the pain in my legs.

But such impossible marathons weren't even the longest ones I ended up running as my form got better and better during the spring. During the quiet exam time without many lectures, I had set aside the 300 km run through Sweden. I completed the stretch to Kristianstad by bus and train from Malmö and can therefore proudly attach ticket documentation showing that not only Fredericia-Christiania, but also Fredriksstadt to Kristianstad lived up to the dogma of a true environmental race. This could also have been the case on the Kristianstad to Kalmar stretch, but here I still chose to take the car to see many of the 57 castles and fortresses such as Glimmingehus, which Daniel's and Lalous' various great-great grandparents owned before we lost them in 1558.

 

Now I had good reason to recapture them - if only as suitable places to stay. Running and genealogy combined must be a bit of fun when they are so boring on their own. The winter stretches between the thousands of sheep and windmills in Ditmarsken were an indescribable experience, but the race through Skåne and Blekinge in the middle of spring in April, May and June was without a doubt the absolute highlight and revelation of my Denmark race. Revelation because to me, Sweden has always just meant boring dark spruce forests that you had to chase through to get to Stockholm. It was simply an indescribable experience to run bare-chested in the golden evening sun through hills and forests with birch trees and moss-covered giant stones one moment, and the next through yellow mustard fields with red wooden houses planted in them. How could we so easily abandon “this main land”, as it was called, I thought? But no matter now, it's still “ours” and you, Nils Vest, have been beating the drum ever since to get me to join your Danish Scanian Association. In my excitement over this revelation of beauty, I now realized that I had unlimited power.

As you will see from the Kristianstad-Karlshamn and Karlshamn-Karlskrona sections of the race diary on my websites, I managed to complete 64 km in a single night - that's one and a half marathons twice. Apparently this is possible if you get a few hours of rest along the way. First I ran 30-32 km in the late cool evening hours, then slept 4 hours in the car and then ran another 30-32 km in the cool morning air. In this way, you can quickly “walk across sea and land” and make the horses of the apostles a serious competitor for cars and trains. In fact, I calculated that with stops at stations, it's only 8 times faster to take the train and only 10 times faster to take the car than to run. So why would you need a car when you can run from Copenhagen to your old state school in Esbjerg in just 24 hours, where our PE teacher Norup even stood and received me in the schoolyard together with the principal and Jydske Vestkysten and a few beers for the achievement and declared that he could now retire satisfied - as the last teacher of our youth.


 

Let me make it clear that it is of course no special sporting achievement to complete, for example, Fyn in just seven hours, as each of the stages run in Denmark itself is no more impressive in length or time than the distances any marathon runner practices on. But added together, a million steps can still look a little surprising, as you can see from the race map.

But it was a bit sad that I didn't have many witnesses to my little Danish record. Fortunately, I managed to convince Vibeke and Lalou to join me on a camping trip in Blekinge and Kalmar Län during the Ascension holiday to join me on my final stage, the 94 km from Karlskrona to Kalmar. Vibeke is always the most skeptical of my ego projects, so it meant a lot to me that she could at least see that I was really working hard when she helped me as a rolling fluid depot on the long stretches of forest where there was no fluid available. But I don't think my running project has been completely crazy. Vibeke agrees that we're reaching an age where it's important to get some exercise and has started running a little herself. But why spend the few precious hours I have with my family in Copenhagen on this when all my time is wasted on the road during my long lecture tours?

The run ended quite naturally, I thought, at Kalmar Castle, which is not only the symbol of Nordic unity, but built by Vibeke's 22nd great-great grandfather, King Knut Eriksson. I was a little curious to “take a peek into Sweden itself” as our old outer border station in Brömsebro has been unmanned for 242 years. Vibeke and Lalou had to agree with the enthusiastic descriptions of nature I had come home with during the Blekinge run and said: “Why don't we go camping over here more often on weekends?”

But the grand finale was still to come, the bridge race across Øresund. For several years, my brother, Niels Jørgen, had worked with the Swedes to make this colossal event happen. Those of you who ran alongside the 100,000 other runners and saw the preliminary events in Brøndbyhallerne will agree. No wonder he never got to run the bridge race himself, as he had wanted to, but ended up falling asleep under the bridge at 5am the next morning. In this way, he entered life as a new grandfather, as the family's newest addition, the dear little Mikkeline, was born as the crowning glory at the same moment. Thus, I managed to outmaneuver a tough competitor, because it doesn't matter how fast 100,000 other sports idiots run, as long as you do reasonably well against your own friends. Fortunately, Torben had dropped out, so now it was all about beating Marius, who had beaten me during Storebæltsløbet. After 1200 km of hard winter training, I thought I was ready for the competition and zigzagged past all my fellow runners for the first 5 km - not least my son, who as a lazy hitchhiker hadn't had any training the day before. Theis was lined up to film my run from his bike, but quickly fell behind as he was not allowed in the tunnel. From my lectures I know how much energy you get from other people and never in my 1200 single kilometers did I run as fast as now when I felt carried by all the others. I finally managed to beat Marius, who only trains a measly 7 km around Bagsværd lake every morning. But considering all my training, it was only an astonishing and disappointing one minute lead - and only a quarter of a minute faster than my time across the Great Belt, where I hadn't trained (.... I won't even mention how fast Marius' son ran!). But this sad winning result is quite consistent with what I had observed during the winter race: I may be a slow runner, but I run like a train - or rather a snorting locomotive - that runs like clockwork no matter how much you lubricate it - at exactly 10 km per hour whether I have trained or not or have been interrupted twice by US trips in a month and a half. I ran so accurately that in Denmark I had started using the kilometer stones as a clock, which is why it felt like I had “lost my watch” when I started in Sweden, which is timeless without kilometer stones.

And here's the benefit of running so predictably. When I got to the finish line in Malmö, everyone around me was lying on the turf, sobbing. Why was that? Well, I guess because they had all “run their hearts out”. While I, on the other hand, was disappointed and felt downright cheated that we were “already” at the finish line, as I hadn't run myself out after the long distances I had just gotten used to in Sweden. So I ran easily and unhindered for the next 20 km up to our old bishop's seat in Lund, as this was the only distance I needed in Sweden to complete my historical record. Incidentally, this will never be beaten by anyone, as both the Great Belt and Øresund are now closed to running. So, as I had planned all spring, I finished my Danish race with a really great finale of a real marathon, in which (unlike previous marathons I have participated in) I swept all my 100,000 fellow runners over the top, so I could sail in majesty to the finish in a windy Lund. Well, completely alone, because there were no spectators and laurel wreaths up there at the finish line.

So if some of you are a bit mean and say that “Jacob just made his record to have something to entertain us in the Christmas letter”, - well, you should be happy that I'm going out of my way to entertain you in this year's Christmas letter. Because apart from my running results on the websites, no one but you really knows anything about this - a race entirely for myself and my friends. Jydske Vestkysten only came into the picture to advertise a CARE show (but that was actually due to one of you Christmas letter readers as the journalist was living with one of my old boyfriends!) But - although there was no shortage of calls for charity sponsors - like the girl who roller-skated from Esbjerg to Copenhagen for a good cause - I always thought this was too ridiculous a project for me to be in the media spotlight. I have more important things to abuse the media for. As a race for my friends, those of you who live east of the Great Belt were invited to a combined bridge walk and party. Partly to celebrate our new connection to Skåne (I'm still opposed to the Øresund Bridge though! Being together on airboats, trains and running promotes understanding between people more, while cars just make you feel lonely). And partly to celebrate Daniel's preliminary record of 10,000 km's hitchhiking in the US and my own record of 1200 running kilometers. We also had a festive day, where we first crossed the bridge in a larger group and then had a party all evening out here in the yard. My party invitations - like my Christmas letters - always come out a little late, so many of you couldn't make it. But it was a great time. Our good friends, Eva and Ebbe, surprised us after our bridge walk by creating an impressive model of the Øresund Bridge in the courtyard with two beautiful road signs pointing to Kalmar one way and to Elbe the other - all filled with delicious fruit. Ebbe is the head of the school of architecture, so this architecturally correct giant model of the bridge definitely felt like a fitting and very well-deserved laurel wreath after a long hard winter's often frozen run. The two should really be called Adam and Eve, as they continually sacrifice themselves for humanity (and, yes, still dare to sip the forbidden fruits of sin). I won't even mention here how Eve has sacrificed herself for me this year, as I won't be able to describe it without it sounding like another one of my crazy ego projects. Let me just say it briefly - without flashes of light like her, life wouldn't be worth living!
 

My father and sister-in-law's cancer had spurred both my running project and Vibeke's smoking cessation on New Year's Eve - this time apparently successfully and with no other help than the cancer ghost. With my running, I literally avoided the hospital myself. During my fall into a mass grave in Kosovo last fall, I had damaged my leg so badly that it caused unspeakable pain when I ran. Various doctors and experts recommended me for surgery, but due to the long waiting times, it couldn't happen until April 17. I couldn't wait for that, so against their warnings, I continued my historic race, which had to be finished for the bridge opening. And slowly the pain started to take over, so when I got to April 17, I completely forgot to cancel at the hospital, which was less fortunate for the others waiting. But the moral is that we shouldn't wait for politicians to change things when you can just take matters into your own hands and “outrun the long waiting times”.


My father's illness and death

Things didn't work out so well for my father. Last fall, he had a fairly innocent prostate cancer that suddenly after Christmas unexpectedly spread to bone cancer. He was in incredible pain and had to be admitted to Esbjerg Central Hospital. He had never been hospitalized in his 79-year-old life, so this was a strange experience here in the hospital where he had sat every week for 50 years giving comfort to his hospitalized parishioners. Fortunately, he soon returned home. He faced death professionally and calmly, but only wanted it to happen at home with his beloved Inge in Agerbæk. However, I wasn't going to throw him overboard that quickly and started treating him with the Indian roots I brought home to Vibeke's sister last fall. He said “good luck” every time he had to drink the tea, which he called “Jægersborg fence”, but drank it willingly. But against my expectations, he became weaker and weaker and more and more bedridden. I had really wanted to take care of him all summer and had set aside time for it and canceled the autumn shows in the US. Both my father and I felt it was too big a task to offer Inge, who was getting on in years. But unfortunately - I would say, because it's an incredibly wonderful task to care for a dying father and for the first time in your life feel like you're doing something sensible and meaningful - Inge felt the same need to show affection. And when the choice came between Inge and me, my father had no doubt about who he wanted around him. And rightly so, because Inge was and is affection itself. But fortunately, for several periods she had to look after her own affairs in Copenhagen and simply recover, which is why I moved in as a nurse.

 

Through our long travels together in America, I had gradually become closer to my father, who belonged to a generation where you didn't always experience great paternal closeness. My very direct speech at his 70th birthday had further loosened us up and brought us closer. But still, it was a completely new experience now, to experience the physical closeness of carrying him around the house - or cleaning everything when the morphine suddenly made him vomit all over everything without warning - even my morning paper before I had read it. Most of the time he slept, where I experienced the eternal silence, interrupted only by the beating of my grandmother's Bornholm clock.

In those lonely hours, I got to grips with his vast library of church history and entertained myself by creating the Internet's largest collection of pedigrees of prophets, saints and popes who are my children's direct ancestors and who are now on my websites. In my father's waking hours, we tried to continue our joint genealogical research, as it was now of utmost importance to quickly get names, dates and descriptions of all the old family photos, Bibles and books. Most of your life, you feel that “it can always wait”. But otherwise I spent my time cooking, trying my best to make “the condemned man's last request” - not the vegetarian food I usually make for Vibeke, but for the first time to familiarize myself with the heavy sauced meat and potato world of West Jutland. I came to enjoy the food myself, as it was inextricably linked to the nostalgic childhood world of the vicarage, which my time with my father now unrolled. As a result, I got fatter and fatter over the summer - not least because my father had suddenly developed an unquenchable appetite for pastries and cakes. Every afternoon - when my father was at his freshest - the silence was suddenly transformed into the feeling of being in a train station. For then there was a real invasion of visitors and one of the happiest moments of the summer was serving tea and coffee and pastries to this sea of people out on the terrace surrounded by my father's proud garden of flowers.

And yes, it was best when there were many people who could then converse with each other, as my father became harder and harder to extract words from, but was delighted to hear the voices of others. For me, it was a true delight to be visited by all the mainstays of my childhood, Hanne Teglgård, Mette Blåberg, Marius' parents etc. but also a bit sad as their better halves were all too often already in the ground themselves. But even though my father became increasingly quiet, he retained a dry sense of humor to the end. When I asked one day if I should call a priest, he shouted: “No, for God's sake. No way.” My astrologer friend, Lisbeth, who without knowing him personally followed his condition from afar and e-mailed me daily about his condition, could see that he was finding more and more strength in his inner faith - a faith that he now kept completely to himself and did not want to “professionally” preach about - and certainly would not have been ruined by the sight of a priest!

When my father's illness seemed to drag on, my brother Steen convinced me to join him, the kids and Lalou on a camping trip in Venice. We were to share the driving, but no sooner had I taken over the wheel than the caravan went into a total tailspin and little Christian howled that his horrible uncle was driving. After 20 hours of driving, we checked into the old Marina camping where we stayed with our parents in childhood, but just as soon, Steen's now divorced wife called to say she would also be arriving by bus.

I thought it was better that they were alone, and as I was far too restless to laze around on a beach, I ran away from them after one night. Vibeke was working with her “Images of the World” festival all summer and Daniel was hitchhiking around Europe himself. His hitchhiking had made me envious of the sense of freedom I had lost over the years and my father's illness had made me realize that if you want to see the world's wonderful people, historical works, etc. - well, you have to hurry. In my newfound interest in history, I had opened my eyes to all the classical works that I had never gotten to see because Vibeke can't stand the heat in the South during our summer vacations. My first destination was Rome, where I still had a lot to see. Paola, an old girlfriend who used to translate my show into Italian, picked me up, but it wasn't the best time to visit her, as she had just tried to commit suicide twice with long hospitalization. As she had to be looked after by her mother, I had her apartment to myself with a visiting friend from Sardinia who was in the middle of her doctoral thesis. However, Paola took me to several parties and concerts, where it struck me again that almost no Italians have children anymore - all married academics with no time for children in their lives - contrary to the images we all have in our heads of the child-rich families from the wonderful Italian movie wave of the 60s.

My goal had been to study classical Greek culture in Sicily, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized I should see it in Greece first. So I rushed off to Greece, where in the short time I had I traveled around and saw everything I had never had time to see, namely the oracle in Delphi, the theater in Epidaurus, Corinth and Agamemnon's ancient castle in Mycenae. At the same time, I took long detours around the wonderful archipelago to see perhaps the highlight of the trip, Delos, the great complex of gods that was the Brussels of that time, the headquarters of the Delian archipelago until it was destroyed by my children's terrible 65th great-great grandfather, Mithridades Eupator of Pontus in 69 BC.

Here I also met a few of you Christmas letter readers, with whom I island hopped for a few days. The only thing that bothered me was that I hadn't brought Lalou along, as she preferred to chase young Italian guys with her cousin. But after a couple of weeks I went back and picked her up, this time at Lake Garda, and we headed south together. First we stayed with Paola in her mother's big apartment and visited the more child-friendly ruins like the Coliseum, the Roman Forum and the Christian catacombs, while Paola, who now had more courage, drove us around to all the places we couldn't reach on foot. Then we went down to Naples and Pompeii, where one of Lalous' ancestors had once perished under the ashes. So we walked around and tried to imagine which of the houses he had lived in.
 

But Lalou is at the age where she'd rather shop than look at ruins, so we made a quick deal: 50% archaeology and museums for 50% shopping every day. And I actually kept my promise and wandered through all the shoe and clothing shops in the wonderful streets of Naples. We even had a little romance in the blue grotto on Capri and in the full moonlight at the bay's fish restaurants. As part of the deal, for the sake of family peace, I had to give up the classical period in Sicily - for this time - after which we returned to my home with Paola in Rome (now for the 4th time) to further shop/archaeologize before heading home.

I had to be home on July 24, when my agent in the US would come and negotiate with me. He had postponed his visit earlier in the summer as his brother was murdered the day before departure. However, as he hadn't sent me any emails all summer, I assumed that he was again unavailable and went to a family reunion at the summer house. Unfortunately, when I later returned home to Gernersgade, there was an angry note from Muwwakkil. “Where were you when I came all the way from America to visit you?” His visit was supposed to be short, but he was so angry - also about racism and the treatment he had received as a black man at the airport - that he had already flown back home the next morning. It made me terribly sad, as I've been inviting him for years - not least because he always complains that I make too much money on the shows he organizes, while he himself sits in poverty in the ghetto, and I wanted to show him how high the cost of living really is in Denmark. But I think he found that out for himself when he ended up at the Sheraton instead of my hospitality.

Vibeke had worked almost 20 hours a day while we were away, and now came the big moment when the biggest festival ever was to take place. Lalou and I were to attend the stylish opening and there were many solemn speeches about globalization and whatnot. But somehow I found both the opening and the venue to be a disappointment compared to the fireworks of an opening that I described in the 25th anniversary Christmas letter for Vibeke's last Africa Festival. And with my usual lack of diplomacy, I couldn't resist saying this to Vibeke. But since this is pretty much the same as telling a new mother that her baby is ugly, I again experienced a tantrum from Vibeke as I did then - but now for completely different reasons, as my art of lack of diplomacy comes in countless disguises. However, this had the advantage that instead of walking around with my wife, I got a longer tour with her boss and now good friend, Connie Hedegård, during his tour of the incredibly interested Princess Alexandra. When I had attacked editor-in-chief Peter Wivel in a column in Berlingeren on the 25th anniversary of Vietnam's liberation, Connie Hedegård had invited Peter Wivel to a confrontation with me on her debate program “Deadline” on DR2, but this, she now told me, Wivel had refused on the grounds that “it was way past his bedtime at night.” This could have been amusing, as I had known Wivel in a slightly more left-wing version in our Vietnam youth and at Information. But he obviously didn't want to shake things up any more than necessary.

Otherwise, the festival's debates were the best part for me. Especially the one about the importance of shaking up the past regarding the Truth Commission in South Africa, which has inspired me a lot in my own work. I was also pleased to meet South Africa's ambassador for the first time since the apartheid era, who at the time had used my premises in Købmagergade for his “subversive terrorist work.” Vibeke was so worn down by the preparations for the festival that she didn't have the energy to go to the official dinners herself, but sent me as her representative. And it wasn't the worst job I could get, especially when I had representatives from the Truth Commission at the table - and they perhaps poured a little too much into the glasses .... with their special ability to bring the truth to the table!
 

Continued in part 2

Back to overview