August 17, 2015
Ledoje, Denmark: Tomorrow, tomorrow!
TOMORROW I will achieve my first cycling dream: I'll see the mermaid in Copenhagen harbour.
Nothing to you, I know. Millions see it every year. You probably can't get to it for crowds from sunrise to dusk. But I don't care. Today I rode through part of Copenhagen to get to where I am now. So I have ridden to Copenhagen, my ambition. Tomorrow I'll go back by bus and train, so I can wander without a bike.
And today? Well, the mosquitos didn't take long to realise I was still there this morning. I read once from what distance a mosquito can detect the smell or warmth of bare skin. I forget what it is but I remember thinking mosquitos must have some hellish nostrils.
It's academic whether they were there just for me, or because of the latitude, or because I was near rotting wood and stagnant water. They came, I saw and I swatted. The few that got through did it at a terrible cost to their pals.
It's been a pleasant day, but not one about which I remember much. Just wheat fields, some harvested, some not, some even returning to green. There were short sharp hills, well-behaved villages, the same orange walls. I kept wondering where the pigs were. I've been in Denmark for several days without seeing one. So where does Danish bacon come from?
And then, how about Danish pastries? Had I had any? Was there anything else I'd missed?
That's the sort of day it was.
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And then I got to Køge. I'd been looking forward to that. There's this wonderful story that they burned 15 witches here in seven years. Well, wonderful if you weren't one of the witches, of course. The whole town was convinced there was sorcery afoot. It was 1608 and nobody could walk down the road without people muttering. It wasn't a good time to own a black cat or a broomstick.
Four years of suspicion came to a head. In 1612, a merchant called Hans Bartskær said a posh woman he knew, Johanne Thomes, had sent Satan into his house. In fact the devil had been there for four years but he'd only just got round to complaining about it. That was the reasonable sort of chap he was.
When judges asked how he knew, he said his wife Anne heard a hen one night. They'd gone out to look for it - and there was nothing there. Worse than that, it had happened several times. And it all followed seeing the devil in their house. He never looked the same two times running, but then what else would you expect?
People rushed to say that they only had to have an argument with Johanne and they'd have a difficult accident.
Johanne confessed, but she wasn't going down alone. She named four other women. One, Mette Banghors, confessed she'd met the devil disguised as a rat. Thomes’s maid, Kirsten Lauridsdatter, said her mistress had made her pee in the baptism bowl in church. She probably wished she'd kept quiet; they burned her at the stake for her honesty.
Another of the named women, Annike Kristoffersdatter, added five more to the list. So they burned her as well, then seven more between 1613 and 1615. Hearing the news and not heartened by it, two women killed themselves, one in prison and the other before the constabulary came to fetch her.
It was quite a time. But things have changed since then.
Today's ride: 100 km (62 miles)
Total: 4,122 km (2,560 miles)
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