One of the first things you notice when visiting Denmark is how utterly, beguilingly pleasant everyone is. Unlike their counterparts in Germany, Poland or Spain, waiters, bar staff, taxi drivers and ordinary people in the street will go out of their way to be helpful, in a completely natural and cheerful way.

It’s such an endearing quality that everyday encounters give you the kind of spiritual boost you habitually experience upon returning to Glasgow, following an enforced visit to Edinburgh.

They even have word for this collective warmth: hygge (pronounced hoog-gah), which means creating a warm atmosphere and enjoying the good things in life with good people.

The next thing you notice is how freely people express themselves in public, not in a touchy, showy, feel-my-angst kind of way, but they leave you in no doubt about where they stand.

During a trip to Copenhagen, where I spent most of last week, the city was awash with micro expressions of solidarity with the people of Gaza and Lebanon.

I mention this not as the start of an unsolicited travel article, but because Denmark is frequently cited as a model for an independent Scotland.

Read more by Carlos Alba

As a fellow small nation in the north Atlantic, surrounded by water and with a similar climate, demography and holding of natural resources, it is held up as the sort of society we could be, if only we had control over our own destiny.

Objectively, there is nothing to prevent Scotland from being like Denmark and why would we not want to be?

Since 1979, it has been ranked among the world’s happiest countries by successive........

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