Let me guess. You’re reading this piece in bed, baled up in some art-directed duvet and thick Instagram-approved cashmere socks, mindlessly slurping artisanal hot chocolate or even glogg, the Scandinavian Christmas drink that sounds like heaven, but tastes like the penny-sweet spittle at the bottom of the ball pit at Ikea. It’s three or four in the afternoon, but you’ve told yourself it’s fine: staying in bed like a toddler and drinking themed alcohol is a chic lifestyle trend sanctioned by people from rural Denmark. It even has a name. It is called hygge.
Hygge is the art of living in old, dirty clothes for days on end, watching YouTube tutorials through strange tears. It is filthy bed socks and crusty knickers and directional twigs masquerading as a forward-thinking fashion statement. But where Danish people do hygge beautifully, allowing each moment to unfold like a cashmere-clad kitten, British people cannot. What happens when British people attempt hygge is slugge. Slugge is like hygge but conducted in Slough. It is pronounced “bleurgh”, like the air exiting the bag of an old vacuum cleaner.
“What happens when British people attempt hygge is slugge — pronounced like ‘bleurgh’
For example: you attempt to eat a mince pie in bed — so toasty — but, bleurgh, end up getting crumbs and weird tarlike drool down your cleavage and all over the sheets. You select and style a gorgeous shabby-chic Romanian gypsy-themed Christmas tree and homemade decorations — only hairdressers obviously “try” with shop-bought trees and trinkets — but end up with an item that looks like a broken bog rag you’ve dragged out of the canal. You attempt a jaunty Christmas jumper — chic, right? —but end up with hideous nylon burns and sweaty tits. This is not hygge. It is slugge.
I have been trying hygge for three weeks now and I can tell you that whenever I do it, it looks like pie-smeared bedding and laziness. It’s a dismal rerun of the time when everyone started swooping around the house in titty jumpers and cheap silk dressing gowns, saying they were domestic goddesses. Only you’re not Nigella Lawson, you’re a fat girl from Peterborough with half a foot of dried cream hanging down one side of your mouth, and if you go anywhere near that candle, you’ll go up like a pig in a blanket.
Domestic goddessing has been overtaken by domestic slobbessing, the perfect pastime for a generation who have nothing to worry about except what an egg with 11 followers might have just said to them on Twitter. It is a physical manifestation of Strictly, Bake Off, Cash in the Attic and any other blankets-based cosy television dreamt up by the wily and clever liberal elite in order to keep poor and lazy people spending money from bed. It is beyond the land of Boxsetshire, not so much a political movement as a political lack of movement. Slugge will kill us all.
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Maybe it won’t kill us, but it does render most people braindead, unable to tell the difference between a genuinely cosy activity and state-licensed mediocrity. Hygge diehards will insist that it is a philosophy rather than a lifestyle (according to one website it involves taking pleasure in everyday activities, including “making coffee a verb”). But it’s not even a lifestyle in my view, it is an advanced form of virtue-signalling, in which people who voted Remain compete to post the most tasteful pictures of leaves on the internet.
So divorced from real life is any aspect of hygge that it can mean anything from lightly warmed Tupperware to hot marshmallows, pork roasts, gloves on radiators, folded cashmere, fairy lights — any activity, in fact, that can be enhanced by buying a mountain of tat through sheer bored tears from Oliver Bonas. It is, according to one definition, “the complete absence of anything annoying or emotionally overwhelming”. How pathetic is that? Life is annoyance. Living is the art of being overwhelmed. Embrace it. Enjoy it. Or fall for the alternative, which is safe spaces and no rude words, lying in bed in a filthy Victorian nightie watching episodes of Westworld, wondering why no one has sexually touched you for at least seven years.
A few years ago, I went for a Christmas break to a hotel in the Cotswolds that I now realise was one of my earliest unwitting attempts to embrace hygge. I had met the love of my life and — this is how pernicious hygge is — I thought the best way to celebrate this would be two nights in the most socially anxious but best-decorated part of the country. The rooms were filled with white sheets and unlimited sloe gin. The reception was encrusted with tiny fairy lights and goop-covered twigs. In every room there was a scent dispenser belting out every strain of clove, cinnamon, spiced apple and vanilla.
It was overwhelming, like trying to relax inside of a medieval monk’s cassock. After a while even the food started to taste of waxy scented candles. It was like guzzling pure cosiness and it was as sweet and sickly as poisoned apples. Thankfully he is still talking to me.