Given our Danish-centric interest in news, I’m not sure we would have been able to use “The reign of Spain falls gamely in Ukraine”, even if the Italians had narrowly triumphed in Sunday’s Euro 2012 final, but that’s the thing about good headlines – they often depend on the unexpected. Like the time Inverness Caledonian Thistle beat Celtic – a shock result that produced “Super Caley go ballistic, Celtic are atrocious”.
Coming up with that headline in the early, waking hours of Monday morning was my subconscious mind’s way of dealing with the loss that the end of a major football championship brings. But it needn’t have bothered – after all, what did Freud know? With Wimbledon climaxing this weekend, the British Open laying it on in a fortnight, and the Olympics coming at the end of the month, we’re spoilt for sport this summer.
Really, I sometimes wonder what I’d do without it. Then again, it hasn’t always been this way for armchair sports spectators. Go back 90 years, and the Olympics was a jolly for toffs and the World Cup a mere glint in Jules Rimet’s eye. Now I understand why jazz became so popular then – anything to escape the boredom of the ‘roaring’ 1920s.
So it’s kind of interesting to see it emerging now the football’s over in the shape of Valby Summer Jazz and the Copenhagen Jazz Festival, to which we are dedicating four full pages this week: a full run-down, or as much as we can do to cover ten days and almost a thousand concerts at 100-odd venues.
But as much as the people of this city love jazz, they love their summerhouses more. For the rest of the month, it will be like the day after the Day of the Triffids every single day. And to reflect this mood, for the next five weeks we will be running travel features, including trips to Oslo (which kicks off proceedings this week), Sweden, and even one to Asia.
Who said we only had a Danish-centric interest in things?
