Yes, this is a bit late – I've been here over a month now. Whatever!!

So, what am I doing here? (No, seriously: what the hell am I doing here??)

I was born in the Midlands area of England, and moved south, to a little bit north of London, when I was 2 years old. At school, I learned French, up to the age of 16 – and then stopped. Went to university, met a girl, moved in together, got married. My parents weren't ones for taking my sister and I on exotic holidays when I was young – a few trips over to northern France with the caravan, and that was it. And my partner wasn't keen on the idea of foreign travel at all, and so ... we didn't. So I settled in to a life of living and working in Britain, and taking holidays in Britain, and speaking only English.

And that's the way it was, for almost 30 years. But now: Denmark.

So what changed?

A reasonably short version of the story is: my friend Aimee, who used to work on the same team as me at the BBC in London, had the idea, the dream, of moving to Denmark. And she made it happen. But also, along the way, I got suckered into the dream too. But whereas she felt more convinced that she wanted to move, and could move, I wasn't so sure.

Around the same time Aimee shared her Danish dream with me, my wife and I started separating. So during the first half of 2018, as Aimee made more and more progress towards Denmark (visiting, finding a possible job, getting the job, setting a date to move), I was getting divorced; moving out of the town I'd always lived in, and instead to London; and just generally working out what I wanted to do with my life. Stay in London, working at the BBC? London, but working elsewhere? Move out of London again, but commute in? Move to the south coast? The north? Scotland? Denmark? Somewhere else?

Fast forward a little to August: Aimee had left the BBC, but not yet moved to Denmark; and I was by now pretty convinced that I wanted to do the same, but hadn't made any steps in that direction. Until one day when my boss at work had massively pissed me off, and that night (about 2am, if I remember correctly), I started applying for jobs in Copenhagen.

So, here I am. My divorce is almost complete – I think we're just in the queue at the courts for the decree absolute. My ex and I have disentangled our lives, but we're still really good friends, which is great. I left the BBC on January 11th, flew over to Denmark on January 17th, and started my new job on February 1st.

I've survived quite a lot of change and challenge over the last 7 years or so, and now I find myself in a new country, learning a new language, doing a new job, and trying to build up my circle of friends here to be more than 1. It hasn't always been easy, and of course there will be more challenges ahead.

But what am I doing here? Actually, grinning quite a lot!

I live in Denmark now, and am not too bad at Danish. How cool is that??