00:02
Merete Angelica Baird
I chose Evicted Tenants by Eric Henningsen, a forlorn painting from 1892 of poor people evicted from their home.

00:13
Merete Angelica Baird
The painting shows a grandmother and a young wife and a little girl and their miserable belongings in snow and sleet, and a husband discussing with a policeman who has evicted them.

00:26
Merete Angelica Baird
And the neighbors, like us, are looking at all the destruction that's happening. And of course, the authorities are at a safe distance. They are standing there, but they're so far away, you can hardly see them. And they certainly don't notice the desolation that they are creating with their power.

00:44
Merete Angelica Baird
Even though this is a story about people in 1892 being evicted, it also very much mirrors the present situation in the US, even though the painting has nothing to do with that — the feeling that one feels right now for all the defenseless people in America that's being thrown out in this lavine of firings and immigrant deportations that Musk and Trump are organizing.

01:13
Merete Angelica Baird
This picture gives very much an emotion that's timeless.

01:23
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
My name is Tina Jøhnk Christensen, and I'm the host of Danish Originals, a podcast series created in partnership with the American Friends of the National Gallery of Denmark and the National Gallery of Denmark. Our goal is to celebrate Danish creatives who have made a significant mark in the US.

01:41
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Today our guest is Merete Angelica Baird, a Danish journalist. Welcome Merete.

01:47
Merete Angelica Baird
Tak.

01:49
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
We're very happy to have you here on Danish Originals. We are talking to you from Los Angeles. I'm in my office and I'm looking at trees and a film poster for Blow-Up that Michelangelo Antonioni made in 1966. Where are you at the moment and what are you looking at?

02:09
Merete Angelica Baird
Well, right now I'm looking at you!

02:12
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
That's nice. Thank you!

02:14
Merete Angelica Baird
But I'm in New York in our apartment in the middle of Manhattan. And we are on 66th Street, and right now I'm in my office sitting in front of my computer. But if I look out the window, there's the Catholic Church. In fact, I always feel it's God's eye looking in through our windows. There's these lovely round stained glass windows in that church that look right into our bedroom, I feel. And the Catholic Church is on 66th Street and Lexington.

02:43
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
So you're in the heart of Manhattan, that sounds fantastic.

02:47
Merete Angelica Baird
Yes, right in the heart of Manhattan.

02:49
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You recently turned 87. You are fresh as a sea eagle, as we say in Danish, that's directly translated in English. You say "fit as a fiddle." I introduced you as a freelance journalist and in spite of your age, where most people have retired, you are still busy at the computer. What was the last piece that you wrote and for whom did you write it?

03:14
Merete Angelica Baird
Well, I seem to remember the last piece I wrote was the Weekendavisen, it was last year. It was actually an article about the exhibition of netsuke in the Jewish Museum in New York, based on the book The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal, who tells the extraordinary tale of his extremely wealthy Jewish family in Vienna. The Nazis came and evicted them and stole everything, and sent them away.

03:45
Merete Angelica Baird
But one of their maids saved their collection of netsuke — this very extraordinary little artwork, the Japanese used them in their kimonos — and kept them in her mattress under the bed. And so when De Waal's uncle came back after the war, she gave him that.

04:05
Merete Angelica Baird
And that's the only thing that family saved because the Austrian government has kept the palaces and all the treasures that the Nazis stole from them. And so there was this extraordinary exhibition at Jewish Museum where all the netsuke was shown.

04:23
Merete Angelica Baird
I'm actually having a little bit of a Sabbat here because I'm very busy working on my book. I have for about 25 years for Weekendavisen written what they call a madklummer, a foodie piece, and that was started by the then editor Anne Knudsen who said, you could write about whatever you wanted.

04:43
Merete Angelica Baird
But you had to have a couple of recipes in each piece that was to be about 800 to 1,000 words, and the piece and the recipes had to make people want to go out straight away and buy food to make those recipes. Since I could write about whatever I wanted, I had really fun playing. We had a very interesting life at the time, Euan and I, my Scottish husband and I, we lived and traveled all over the world, and of course I could tell about many different things in those recipes.

05:15
Merete Angelica Baird
And that is now being made into a book, which is a kind of recipe book and memoir. Because in between, I'm writing essays about my life and about my very interesting long marriage with this Scot that I've been married to for 65 years.

05:35
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Wow. Congratulations. That's an achievement.

05:40
Merete Angelica Baird
Yes, I suppose so, yeah. And also, I have been one of the three Ladies of the World, very popular Danish TV programs where they have taken three old women: myself, Lotte Freddie, who actually just turned 90, and Bente Scavenius, who is very young. She's only just turned 80, so she's a kid.

06:05
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Yeah, she's a baby.

06:06
Merete Angelica Baird
First, we were in eight different towns in Europe. And the idea is that we sort of show each other things in these towns that are not so incredibly well known. We don't go to the Eiffel Tower in Paris. And we don't go to Prado in Madrid. We go to things that are very interesting but slightly less well known.

06:26
Merete Angelica Baird
Last summer, we were all over Denmark. And I think they're probably the best programs. It turns out there's so many insanely interesting things to see and show in Denmark. And they're making a fourth season with us. And we're going to have two more programs in Denmark. One in the Faroe Islands. And one in Greenland.

06:48
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I would like to return to that a little later in our talk. I would like to continue to ask you a little bit about your career as a journalist. I am a freelance reporter, too, based in Los Angeles, and I focus on Hollywood and human interest stories. And I would like to pick your brain for selfish reasons, too. What is the trick to making it as an international freelance journalist? You're on your own. You just have to do it. How did you do it all these years?

07:18
Merete Angelica Baird
I called up Politiken and I said, are you interested in the article about this or that? And they would say, yes. And then I would write the article and they would print it. I wrote a lot for Politiken for many years. I also wrote these quite funny political things, because we lived in Paris and in New York. And we went to and fro between Paris and New York, like other people take the subway to Nørreport Station.

07:48
Merete Angelica Baird
I could write from these two places. And then, of course, I started reviewing art shows, and then later on, I did haute couture as a whole other section. I have for 25 years covered all the haute couture shows in Paris, first for Politiken, and then for Weekendavisen, and then for Elle in recent years. But nobody's interested in haute couture anymore, so unfortunately that has died out.

08:16
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And we have to mention to the listeners who are not Danish that Politiken and Weekendavisen are some of our large newspapers in Denmark.

08:25
Merete Angelica Baird
It was extremely interesting. And I was very lucky that I was able to get in. It was very, very hard for Scandinavians to get into the haute couture shows, because there were really not very many rich Scandinavians who were so rich that they could afford to have haute couture.

08:41
Merete Angelica Baird
But since I lived in Paris and so on, I had connections, so I managed to get into a lot of the interesting shows, not so much as a journalist, but as a client, even though I didn't buy anything, of course. And it was immensely interesting, because they are so different. Each designer is an artist. And it's just like looking at different paintings or different artworks, reading different books.

09:06
Merete Angelica Baird
The way the artists interpret clothes. And they may not be beautiful. They could be pretty ghastly, a lot of them, actually. But some of them are also extraordinarily beautiful. And then the handicraft, the artwork, le petite main, that sit and do all this extraordinary artwork on women—

09:27
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Is that what it's called, the little hand, le petite main?

09:30
Merete Angelica Baird
Yeah, le petite main. Yeah, and they are really good. Their hands are sitting well on them, as we say in Danish.

09:41
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And who did you meet there? Did you meet some of the big designers?

09:45
Merete Angelica Baird
Not really. I met Jean Paul Gautier, some of whose staff I adore. And I met Lagerfeld. But otherwise, I was more a spectator.

09:56
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
How has the business changed in the years that you've been active as a reporter?

10:02
Merete Angelica Baird
Well, I think it's changed recently now. They don't use freelancers so much anymore. I think they're poorer.

10:09
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Yeah, that's a big thing. The newspapers and the magazines have less subscriptions and—

10:15
Merete Angelica Baird
That's right.

10:17
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I know it's a very hard question to answer, because you've written so many articles and met so many people while working on your stories, but which ones are your favorites because of the experiences and the people you met while making them.

10:32
Merete Angelica Baird
For a long time, I wrote a letter from Broadway for Weekendavisen. And that was really fun because I had to go and see a lot of theater, and communicate that theater was fun. And all of this was fun. It still is.

10:50
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Where have your stories taken you? How many places have you been to to do your stories?

10:55
Merete Angelica Baird
Well, my husband was head of a very big oil service company called Schlumberger, which gave me the chance to come with him to places that people couldn't normally go. I was in Saudi Arabia with him at the time when there was absolutely no way. It was just only because he could open the doors for me. I was in Iran in '92, and we had lived in Iran, so to tell about that. And of course we lived in all these places that I wrote from, and that was very interesting.

11:27
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What did you write from Saudi Arabia and Iran?

11:30
Merete Angelica Baird
I just told about what it was like to be there as a woman.

11:35
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And what was it like?

11:37
Merete Angelica Baird
Well, of course, I was very protected. It was extraordinary. The radio every day apparently went talking badly, down talking foreigners. So when we went in the street, us European women, you felt that the Saudis, who were completely covered — completely covered, even their eyes were covered, they had to look through this chiffon, they looked at you in a very haughty manner.

12:02
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Wow, okay. That's a bit of a culture shock maybe.

12:07
Merete Angelica Baird
Yeah. When I was in Saudi Arabia in the '90s, I had never seen a place where all the women were totally covered like that. You couldn't go out. Of course, we had to cover up, too. But we were more so just with a cloth around our head. I always wear a hat, which nobody else does.

12:26
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And how was Tehran compared to that? Because that was a more modern society.

12:32
Merete Angelica Baird
We had lived in Tehran under the Shah, and I had walked around in my normal clothes. And when we came there in '92, I came along with Euan on a visit, I had to be completely covered. And I remember the state of total fury all the time. And it was awful, because it was very hot, you couldn't have your shirt open, you had to have it all closed up, or otherwise they were looking at you. Or to have gloves on.

12:59
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
So as you mentioned, recently you've become known for being more than a journalist. You have also become a well-known tv personality in a quite wonderful series called Verdensdamerne, and I would translate it into The Women of the World —

13:15
Merete Angelica Baird
Ladies — Ladies of the World.

13:17
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Ladies of the World. It follows you and two other mature ladies, as you mentioned, Lotte Freddie and Bente Scavenius, as you visit various cities all over Europe. How did this series come about and how did you get introduced to it? And how excited were you when you first heard about it and they wanted to include you in something very special like this?

13:40
Merete Angelica Baird
Well, I thought it was really funny. It was Lone, the producer Lone Bodholt from DR2. She had made something with me. I had been part of a tv program earlier about haute couture. And so she remembered me. And when she got this idea of making this series, she asked me to be one of them, with Bente and Lotte. And of course, I thought that was really fun and I was very happy to be asked.

14:07
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Did you know Lotte and Bente beforehand or were you introduced to each other?

14:11
Merete Angelica Baird
Bente is an old friend of mine. We've known each other for 100 years. Lotte, I only knew peripherally. Yeah.

14:19
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
In the series, you have a lot of culturally stimulating experiences together. You are all pretty cultured, so to speak, and knowledgeable. And it is a lot of fun listening to what you have to say to each other when you visit all these amazing places. How significant is it for you to travel and be stimulated culturally? And did this series add to the joy that you feel when you travel and experience cultural things like this?

14:49
Merete Angelica Baird
They have been absolutely tremendous and very stimulating. And at a time in my life where I'm not traveling so much anymore because my husband has had a terrible stroke, so he is handicapped. And so the way I travel nowadays is really mostly between our homes in Denmark and Paris and New York. I don't really get out to travel like we used to anymore. It's absolutely terrific to get this additional travel here with the tv program.

15:24
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And what's it like having the two ladies as your travel companions?

15:29
Merete Angelica Baird
Oh, they're great. We get on very well. It's just terrific. We're very well chosen because we are very different, but we all have something to contribute.

15:41
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Yeah, you have great chemistry. And you go visit a lot of museums and talk about art, partly because Bende is an art historian. In Madrid, for instance, you love the little intimate Sorolla Museum. What is your own relationship to art and art museums? Bende is a specialist. Do you enjoy it?

16:02
Merete Angelica Baird
I've written about it. I have reviewed big art exhibitions in New York and Paris for the last 50 years or something, maybe not quite 50 years. And so I have a tremendous interest in art. And of course, it's wonderful to have Bende interpret it, because she's a brilliant formidler, as you say in Danish— communicator.

16:26
Merete Angelica Baird
My father took me to lots of art openings when I was a teenager. And we have a painter in the family, Lauritz Hartz. He was my father's cousin. And we have quite a lot of his stuff on our walls.

16:41
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
A writer in the Danish newspaper Politiken said that Verdensdamerne, Ladies of the World, challenges our Danishness because you three ladies are larger than life. And you don't apologize for it. You personally have been outside of Denmark for many years. But have you kept some of the Danish parts of you that you still recognize as being very Danish?

17:08
Merete Angelica Baird
I have fought all these years to keep my Danishness. That's the whole point why I was writing in Danish, to Denmark. When I'm living in New York and in Paris and all over the world, it would have been much more logical for me to write in English. But it was so incredibly important for me to keep my language active and to be close to Denmark.

17:29
Merete Angelica Baird
I feel extremely Danish. I feel totally Danish. And also I had this horrible experience halfway through life, when I suddenly discovered my Danish had become passive. And that was when I started going to interpretation school, tolkeskolen, and suddenly realized that my Danish didn't spring out as automatically as it does when you speak it normally.

17:55
Merete Angelica Baird
I've been really working very hard to keep my Danish. And the first articles I wrote to Politiken, they said to me, Oh, well, we had to translate your articles first, you know. They don't say that anymore.

18:08
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
So now you're more fluent in it. And in terms of the larger than life part, do you agree with that statement that you girls are larger than life and that we Danes normally are not?

18:21
Merete Angelica Baird
No, I wouldn't say the Danes normally are not. I suppose we're Danish Originals!

18:28
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Yes! True! Good point!

18:32
Merete Angelica Baird
I think it's because all three of us have supreme self-confidence. And we have self-confidence because we have managed to achieve some of the things we meant to do in life. I think that is what it is, that we rest in ourselves. The French say, bien dans sa peau, meaning feeling at ease in your skin.

18:56
Merete Angelica Baird
And I think all three of us do that, in spite of being old and crinkled. And somehow you feel — well, like Karen Blixen said, old age is in masks. You are still young inside, if you're lucky enough to be allowed to be that. And I think that's all three of us.

19:16
Merete Angelica Baird
Bente, of course, is a ball of fire. She's unbelievable. She makes new tv shows all year round. She travels all over Denmark giving talks. She writes one excellent book after the other. She's amazing. And Lotte also has an energy, I've never seen such energy.

19:35
Merete Angelica Baird
And she also writes and goes around to all the fashion shows in Denmark and goes around giving talks. In one of the many interviews in connection with her 90th birthday the other day, she said, I could do another 90 years.

19:52
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
That's fantastic. I have to say that you ladies are a big inspiration and great role models for the rest of us. I believe that you have lived in 16 countries. What does living in so many countries give you in terms of your understanding of the world?

20:11
Merete Angelica Baird
Ah — the world is a very big thing. I would say, you understand each place you've lived in doesn't make you understand the world. We were very lucky, Euan and I. I was his oil wife. And we stayed in countries that were just getting rid of their colonizers, and had just gotten freedom. And everything was still working, because the colonizers had left the countries in good shape with proper courts and proper laws and regulations that functioned still.

20:44
Merete Angelica Baird
And so there was this tremendous optimism in the years that we went to Borneo, which was British Borneo and a bit later became, of course, independent. And we were in Nigeria. Our young Nigerian contemporaries would come up to us when we met them at cocktail parties and stuff and say, Hey, you Europeans, you're about ten years ahead of us, but we'll catch up with you in ten years. It was a very interesting time.

21:10
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Did you live in Lagos?

21:12
Merete Angelica Baird
We lived in Port Harcourt, which was in Nigeria.

21:16
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
They have a huge film industry now. It's quite impressive. Your husband Euan is from Scotland. How did the Scottish Danish combination work for you in terms of the cultures you both brought into your partnership?

21:32
Merete Angelica Baird
I think it is amazing to be married to a Scot. Scots and Danes are extremely well fitted for each other. And we're both small countries, and all a little bit very irritated with a bigger neighbor. I think if I'd married an Englishman, I would have killed him years ago. I don't think I could possibly have been married to an Englishman. Euan, of course, was a unique personality. Extraordinary personality. Danes and Scots go very well together.

21:58
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
How did you end up meeting?

22:00
Merete Angelica Baird
I was in Cambridge. Before I studied law in Copenhagen, I was at Cambridge studying British life and institutions, something dry, to see if law would be the right thing for me to study. And by some extraordinary quirk of coincidence, we ran into each other.

22:18
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
How lovely. How was Cambridge?

22:22
Merete Angelica Baird
Cambridge was wonderful. I was so lucky to have been there.

22:26
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Your husband and you have homes in Tåbæk, New York, and Paris, and you do annual holidays in Antigua. Where do you feel at home? Is it everywhere you leave your hat, as one says, or is there anywhere in the world that you feel you truly belong?

22:43
Merete Angelica Baird
I feel at home where we are. When we're in New York, that's my home. When in Denmark, I'm home. In Paris, I'm home, completely, because we lived for so many years in each place that I'm totally at home, each place.

22:56
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And how long has that been the case?

22:58
Merete Angelica Baird
Since 1980, we've lived between Paris and New York.

23:03
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You truly are a lady of the world, I have to say.

23:08
Merete Angelica Baird
It was amazing coming to New York, how you got invited everywhere, how all the doors opened. And we were young, of course, and Euan was obviously a young man on his way up. And it's not at all like that in Paris. The French are much more, what would I say? They were also very provincial. If you weren't French, you weren't really interesting. Whereas in America, wherever you got a chance, and if they liked you, you hung in there. Otherwise, you got spat out again. It was amazing.

23:38
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What was your first apartment in New York?

23:40
Merete Angelica Baird
Just around the corner on Park Avenue, just around the corner from where we are now. It was a lovely apartment. But then, by some quirk of chance, Euan, my husband, saw this one, which is just around the corner, and fell in love with this apartment, and insisted that we move over here, so that's what we did.

23:58
Merete Angelica Baird
And this apartment is fun because it's in a building from 1907, just at the time when they started putting up tall buildings in New York. And people were not yet used to living in layers on top of each other. So this building here is called the Studio Building. It has this huge duplex, a two story big room, and very nice light. It would be a good place for painters to live. Bente was here once and visited and she said, Oh, you got a two room apartment with a riddersal.

24:35
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
With a kind of ballroom.

24:37
Merete Angelica Baird
A huge ballroom, yeah.

24:39
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Let's go back in time a little bit. You grew up in Hellerup. Your mother was an author, Brita Hartz, and she wrote children's books and young adult books. So my guess is that it was a creative childhood home with lots of stories being told. How would you describe it? How would you describe your childhood home growing up in Hellerup?

25:02
Merete Angelica Baird
We lived in a very nice old villa in Jacobsens Alle, which is a cutlet site with a long alleyway going into this very nice, very big garden where I climbed trees and made huts and had a really very nice childhood. We had a wonderful dog, a king poodle. My older sister died of a smallpox injection—

25:26
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I'm so sorry.

25:27
Merete Angelica Baird
— when she was five and a half. The doctor didn't know that if you had eczema, you mustn't have a smallpox injection. So that was, of course, a sorrow that my parents never got over. But they managed to give me a very happy and harmonious childhood anyway, with my big, wonderful dog. And it's true, my mother told wonderful stories, and my mother and I were extremely close.

25:55
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
My dad used to tell me bedtime stories. He made up stories to make me fall asleep. Did your mom do something similar with you?

26:02
Merete Angelica Baird
Oh, yeah. We laughed so much I didn't fall asleep. She was so funny. Yeah, we had really fun.

26:09
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Did she inspire you to become a writer yourself?

26:12
Merete Angelica Baird
My grandfather was Carl Thalbitzer, who was a very well-known writer, and he started Finanstidende, the Financial Times in Denmark that was read all over Scandinavia. So we have inherited a little writing gene from my grandfather.

26:27
Merete Angelica Baird
And his brother was William Thalbitzer, who was professor of Eskimo studies that was called then. And he translated Eskimo poems into Danish and into French, the most beautiful, pure poems I've ever read.

26:45
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You also went to high school in Ordrup in the 1950s. What were your school years like? Were you a good student?

26:53
Merete Angelica Baird
I went to Ordrup Gymnasium.

26:55
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Ordrup Gymnasium.

26:56
Merete Angelica Baird
I had a great time. It was wonderful. I was good at some things. I was good at English and Danish and I wasn't very good at Latin.

27:05
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Who is?

27:07
Merete Angelica Baird
Well, some people were. I was probably a pretty good student. I was okay.

27:12
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And then you moved on to Cambridge and you became a student of law.

27:17
Merete Angelica Baird
And then I went back to the university in Copenhagen, yeah. I wanted to help women, actually. I wanted to be a lawyer, and help women. But anyway, that was stopped when Euan came and swept me away to Borneo and Nigeria, and Paris and Tehran, and Indonesia and Singapore, and Dubai twice — the old Dubai that was a little fishing village, sleepy fishing village.

27:48
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
No more!

27:50
Merete Angelica Baird
No, no more. But it was really interesting to be there, those two times.

27:55
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Talking about helping women, you did write a book called Franske kvinder på vej—

28:02
Merete Angelica Baird
In New York, I started writing books. I wrote a book a year for eight years. And one of them was this very feminist book about French women. Because when we were in Paris in 1975, married French women were still under Napoleonic laws. A woman couldn't open a bank account without a husband, a woman couldn't travel without a husband, and there was this thing about birth control and, of course, abortion. And so I wrote this book, Franske kvinder på vej (French Women Onward).

28:35
Merete Angelica Baird
Yeah, I wrote a book a year for eight years. And then I got terrible eye problems. I had some extremely traumatic years where I had four detached retinas and went blind, and one eye I couldn't see very well. There was this marvelous doctor at Duke University Eye Care Center that rescued my eyes and saved the rest of my life for me. I was so happy and relieved.

29:00
Merete Angelica Baird
I wrote articles. It was better to write articles because we were always traveling. It takes about two weeks or something to do the studies and all the research and so on for an article. And you could do that at each place, instead of sitting for one year with one book where you do the same thing. So that's why I've been writing articles ever since. And it's very stupid of me. I should have written some more books.

29:27
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Well, you influence people in many ways. What are you working on right now? Apart from the book, you are going to be in upcoming episodes of Verdensdamerne.

29:38
Merete Angelica Baird
I'm not working on it yet. No, I'm working on this book. It has to be going to print in May. That's what I'm working on right now.

29:47
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And Verdensdamerne — Where can we expect to see you in the near future?

29:51
Merete Angelica Baird
It will film in June and August, and we will go to two places in Denmark, not yet decided. And then to the Faroe Islands, and hopefully also to Greenland, depending if DR2 can get the money together. And, of course, I am very much hoping, next year, to come to New York and to show my New York to the Danish audience.

30:16
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I'm sure you will not reveal to us where you would take the audience.

30:21
Merete Angelica Baird
Oh, one place, if in New York I would take them to Ellis Island.

30:24
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Okay!

30:25
Merete Angelica Baird
Yeah, I think Ellis Island is extremely moving, and an interesting museum. And of course right now, with all this talk of all the immigration problems, it's really quite extraordinary to go and see Ellis Island. The way they talk about all the difficulties of immigrants, as though it's in the past when it's very, very much in the present.

30:48
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You mentioned in one of your programs of Verdensdamerne that you will work forever till the day you die because what else is there to do? How much has your work shaped who you are, your identity, would you say? How much is the writer you?

31:07
Merete Angelica Baird
Well, it's what I do, it's what keeps you alive. It's fun to use your brain. I don't know —

31:17
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
No, but a lot of people look forward to retirement. They retire in their 60s. They look forward to being on a beach in Spain or wherever they—

31:29
Merete Angelica Baird
But I do that too, on the beach in Antigua. You can easily work on the beach. I've always done that.

31:37
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And my final question to you. You've said life gets shorter and shorter. What do you still want to do? And where, if you don't mind me asking, would you like to be for all eternity?

31:51
Merete Angelica Baird
Well, yes, I actually know exactly where I would like to be buried. I would like to be buried with my mother and father in Hellerup Kirkegård in Denmark. But I don't know if that's possible, considering that I don't really live there. And I want my husband there, too, but— And I want to finish this book here, and then, of course, I want to keep writing. I'll start writing for the papers again. I'm just having a break right now.

32:19
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Well, thank you so much for your time, Merete. We really appreciate that you were part of Danish Originals.

32:26
Merete Angelica Baird
It was fun to be here.

32:27
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Thank you.

32:30
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
For today's episode, Merete Angelica Baird chose Erik Henningsen's Sat ud or Evicted Tenants from 1892 from the collection of the National Gallery of Denmark.