I first went to Denmark by chance more than 20 years ago. I was working as a painter and decorator in Dublin, doing a job for a Danish friend. His elderly mother-in-law, a wonderful, hard-smoking, fun-loving lady named Marian, was visiting. We often chatted in the kitchen over coffee.
"Why don't you paint my apartment in Copenhagen?" she quipped one day.
"Pay my airfare and I'll do it for nothing," I shot back.
"OK," she said and off I went.
My love affair with Denmark (indeed all things Scandinavian) began there and hasn't diminished. I am a sucker for marinaded herrings, raw onions and ice-cold schnapps (consumed simultaneously, you understand), marzipan (best taken separately), jazz pubs, major-league architects who design everything from huge buildings to lampshades and corkscrews, good public transport systems, the insides of Norwegian, Danish and Swedish homes and the climate and landscape of Sweden.
And, yes, the social life was pretty amazing too. (Do not believe all you hear about cold, dour Scandinavians . . .)
For two years I lingered in Copenhagen after painting Marian's flat (and the homes of her many, equally kind and generous friends, plus a stint in Burger King): it is a powerful memory. So the opportunity of a return visit - this time with my own family in tow - was a joy.
Denmark is a great country for a holiday. Ours began on the ferry across the North Sea (Harwich to Esbjerg) when we indulged in the Scandinavian eat-as-much-as-you-want buffet (£14 sterling for adults, £7 sterling for children) - lots of fish and cold meats. From Esbjerg, we went straight across Jutland to Copenhagen.
It remains a wonderful city, a place where people come first. The public transport is superb, the pedestrian streets extensive. The centre has not been ruined by fast-buck developers and careless planners. It remains a place one wants to go to for shopping and enjoyment and, if you are lucky, to live in.
There is hardly a street in the city centre, including the Stroget, the main pedestrian street, where people do not live. Despite a long history reflected in many important, imperial-style buildings, Copenhagen, like many continental cities, retains a youthful feel. The place is alive all the time. And how! Some pubs stay open till 5 a.m., many have jazz bands. There is a wealth of pub-cum-restaurants (Ny Havn, an old canal in the centre, is littered with them); the food is terrific (open sandwiches, marinaded fish and ice-cold schnapps) and the beer is, well, probably the best in the world.
We did two of the big touristy things in Copenhagen: a canal boat tour of the city - a great way to see it - and had a night in Tivoli, the permanent funfair and restaurant park that is as much part of Copenhagen as Disneyland is of Orlando.
For alternatives, go to Christiania, a hippy colony in an abandoned military barracks that for some 30 years has been peopled with dope sellers and peddlers of alternative life-styles. But there are also some wonderfully inventive small homes built along the shores of the fort's moat that are well worth seeing.
Three days in Copenhagen and we were off again back to Jutland. The most amazing part of the drive was crossing the Great Belt Bridge that links the islands of Zealand and Funen.
It is 18 kilometres long and includes the world's longest suspension bridge - and at 65 metres high, it will give you the willies driving across it. It was finished in 1993 and is a forerunner of the bridge currently being built to link Copenhagen and Malmo in Sweden.
In Funen, we blundered across one of those places and events that make holidays. At Nyborg, we stopped at the local castle (built in 1169) in the grounds of which children were participating in a mock medieval battle. Great fun.
And then, it being midsummer night - a very big event throughout Scandinavia - we meandered our way down to the shoreline only to find a huge bonfire and communal party going on as the sun sank slowly, close to midnight.
The next few days were spent at a DanParcs holiday centre near Silkeborg, west of Arhus, Denmark's second city. The centre was slightly Spartan and very much geared towards activity holidays - tennis, horse riding, cycling and walking.
Jutland is very flat and you will not find much dramatic scenery. But for all that, the Danes are hugely proud of their countryside and tend it lovingly. You'll not find fertilizer bags strewn all over the place, and there's no muck on the roads. It is also very, very quiet: in rural Jutland, they go to bed at 10 p.m. - Copenhagen it ain't.
We toured a lot - and there's lots to do.
There's the Kattegatcentret (Kattegat Centre) oceanarium in Grenaa on the peninsula's east coast. Here, apart from the usual tanks filled with sharks, North Sea fish, tropical fish, eels, crabs and the like - all superbly displayed - there's an exhibition about wind power, pegged on a plan to build - in a great, fan-shaped arc stretching out into the sea from Grenaa harbour - a row of nine turbines, each 60 metres high.
The Danes are striving to have 50 per cent of their electricity provided by wind power by 2030 and are pouring millions of krner into research and development. The result, apart from the 9 per cent already achieved, is that Denmark controls 55 per cent of the world market in wind power and employs 15,000 in the industry - more than in fishing (which is amazing when you think of the amount of fish the Danes eat).
The wind-power exhibition is right beside the oceanarium's education corner - a child-friendly, hands-on enclave - a science and environmental centre, where you learn about wave-making, currents, whirlpools, water pressure and river beds. It is all very well done - in a typically Danish child-friendly way.
That's the thing about Denmark: it is all very well done. The whole country.
Jutland also has Legoland, a must if you have children and good value (entrance for a family of four is about £40). And it has Djursland, a peninsula just north of Aarhus, that is littered with theme parks, museums and outdoor activities such as walking, cycling, fishing, swimming, canoeing, golf - the list goes on.
Our best day out was at Farup, a water park near Saltum, in northern Jutland. A great day of energetic and wet fun ended with watching the sun set across the North Sea at Skagen, a thriving fishing port (busy and working, but full of life and fish restaurants - Killybegs take note!) that continues to inspire painters.
Two decades on, I'd happily live in Denmark again.