Thesauruses have words that sum up Christiana. I don’t. I could look them up, but that always makes me feel phoney – like anyone uses words like 'attenuated' without looking them up first.

Actually, I do have words for Christiana. I have a lot of them. Amazing. Weird, bizarre actually. Hilarious. Foreign – really foreign if there’s a word that means that. Scary.

Christiana is a tenuously independent state inside Copenhagen. The history is subtle and impressive and rewards research, but between you and me it boils down to a group of hippies staging a sit-in in some old army barracks in the sixties or whenever, then the government sending in troops to kick them out. Then, this occurring in Scandinavia, you recall, popular opinion fell behind the hippies and the government agreed to let them stay as long as the hippies kept hard drugs under control and, y’know, took regular showers.

The first bar we went into was the best of all. And by ‘best’, I don’t mean the normal, agreed definition of ‘best’ meaning ‘good’. This is the Christiana ‘best’, which probably means ‘most like Christiana’. From what I could see through the thick pot smoke haze, everyone was completely fucked up. And not just fucked up from today’s drugs – fucked up from years and years of drugs. The shower and sleep I needed to leave Christiana behind me wouldn’t help these people. No, their fucked-up-ness had been caked on over the years, their many years of sitting in the bar, doing what they were doing now: nothing. Well, smoking and blankly watching tourists walk in who mildly freak out because of all these fucked-up people, but manage to order a beer anyway.

Their fucked-up-ness had caked on in layers, sediments one on top of the other – there was so much of it, it probably had its own fossil record, small insects and ferns trapped on their skin one day the pot was particularly strong. Their fucked-up-ness probably formed continental plates which creaked slowly across their faces, occasionally causing earthquakes which scare dogs and horses.

Man, THEY were fucked up.