Autumn items

September felt like October, October like November, and now that it is November it feels and looks like December. The sun is out some, but very low in the sky and yellowish, even at mid-day.

I went up to the Dyrehaven on Sunday. This is a large parkland north of Copenhagen that used to be a royal hunting preserve. It stretches about two miles inland from the coast, and four miles north to south. It’s full of tame deer and a few stags carrying surprisingly big racks of antlers (sorry for the blurry image):



Are there deer in suburban parks in the US? I tend to think people would treat them as free meat.

When you’re in Dyrehaven you can easily imagine that you’re in a Robin Hood movie—it’s sparsely forested and full of big wide old oaks:



Sunday was the running of the Hubertus Hunt, which is a foxhunt only without any foxes—or hunting, for that matter. It’s about 100 people in red coats tally-ho’ing around the Dyrehaven for a couple of hours. I rode up and stood in the mud for 90 minutes to obtain the following action shots:





I was positioned by a water jump. Some of the horses leaped gracefully over a log into the water. Others stepped more carefully. Some refused outright and so the riders would have circle around and try again. After three strikes they’d open a gate by the side and let the poor animal walk through.

There were Red Cross teams on hand, but fortunately nobody fell.

Friday was Halloween and we actually had four or five parties of trick-or-treaters. I’m not sure exactly what they were saying but it wasn’t “trick-or-treat.” They’ve only been celebrating this “American” holiday here for the past 10 or 15 years, so most of the adults are not in favor. The kids seem convinced though, and I don’t think there’s any way to remove a holiday that’s been cemented to the calendar with sugar.

There’s no such thing as Thanksgiving over here, of course. They do seem to be taking to “American football” however. They show two NFL games on TV Sunday nights—one at 7:00 and one at 10:00. The commentators are the same beefy guys you see doing this job in the US, except they’re speaking Danish. Very strange. But football is as much a television show as it is a sport, so it’s not too surprising that it packages up well for foreign consumption. Baseball, however, the Danes find boring and incoherent. Like cricket.