Alex James: The Great Escape

An 04.30 taxi took me from the Groucho Club to Heathrow for the first flight to Copenhagen on Wednesday. I've always liked Denmark. What a vast and bewilderingly wonderful world it is, with all these rooms I never go in. My heart went faster all the way to Heathrow with the glamour of dawn, escape, the thrill of the unexpected and the thought of hot dogs.

Denmark has a snack culture to rival our own. Where we've taken the " ready salted" theme and run with it to produce the world's most interesting crisps – in Denmark they have been pimping their ice creams beyond extravagance and expanding the premise of the humble hot dog, turning the sausage sandwich into a gourmet delight, something to rival New York pizza, Tokyo noodles and Frazzles. In London only drunk people who have been to the Hippodrome eat hot dogs. At a Danish hot-dog wagon, it's like Alcoholics Anonymous. You might bump into anybody. You never know who's going to be telling you to pass on the sauce at the dog stand.

I wanted to investigate the international sausage-scape because my pigs, the empresses, are ready to breed. We've been fencing and ditching like crazy to make ready for piglets, so sausages are on the horizon. If they are going to be sausages, I owe it to them to find them the best sausage situation.

You can still smoke in baggage reclaim at Copenhagen and it was all right to have a big moustache, if you wanted. There was one in particular that I just couldn't help staring at.

My friend Robert greeted me with a sign that said "Hot Dogs", and two steaming "poelse" dogs with everything, and we went off to the Danish meteorological institute to look at their satellite and talk magnets. A man with one eye introduced us to a man with one arm and they started talking about the earth's magnetic field. It was quite dreamlike. It was still only breakfast time. At the institute they manufacture and supply the very best and most stylish devices for measuring the planetary magnetic field. The detectors were set in a block of marble: lab equipment with Bang & Olufsen chic. I immediately wanted one to go with my wind-speed indicator and rain gauge.

It seems rather embarrassing that we are still mucking around setting fire to hydrocarbons, spoiling everything, when the entire universe is made from energy. The earth's magnetic field is another potentially useful resource, but it does seem to be getting weaker. Our guides explained that it always does this before the poles swap and they didn't seem too worried about it. "Oh, it happens all the time," they said. "We don't need compasses any more anyway."

I'd had six hot dogs and an ice cream by the time I went on the rollercoasters at the Tivoli gardens back in Copenhagen. Imagine if the London Eye went really fast and there were loads of other rides. Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen.

a.james@independent.co.uk

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