It seems improbable that a single country could get so much right.

Second happiest nation in the world. Number 6 on the Human Development Index (the rightful successor to GDP per capita). The least corrupt. Acknowledged pioneer in urban planning and social security. Champion of a major type of renewable energy, wind. Exponent of back-to-basics representative democracy that has delivered popular policy on the EU, immigration, and Covid - thus begetting the least cynical populace in Europe and the only social-democratic party that can still win an election.

Home of hygge, Aqua, the world’s best restaurant and its first electric car ferry (pictured by the author last month).

If Denmark didn’t exist, it would need to be invented.

Having traveled the length and breadth of four continents in the last three years, without taking a single plane, I now consider myself something of an expert at the art of backpacking. Here are 10 tips for doing it right.

1. Dump your backpack and get a travel bag instead. Travel bags, AKA duffle bags, have the killer feature of opening from the side rather than the top, and these days they have back straps too. Top-loading backpacks are obsolete technology. They are zombies which survive on nostalgia and groupthink. They are evolutionary vestiges which take forever to disappear, like seals' feet.
2. Get a smaller one. You need half of what you think you need. The tiny handful of backpackers I see with small backpacks are invariably the most experienced. I manage with a 40L model. Do your back a favor.
3. Pack more underwear. Get an extra week between laundries! It will never add up to a full machine anyway. (Alternative system for hardcore types: wash it by hand every 3 nights, and enjoy a featherweight backpack.) And pack less outerwear. Nobody will see you long enough to notice.
4. Use bar soap. Liquid invariably leaks, however carefully you close the bottle. (Alternative solution: use smooth-gripped screw bottles and keep them inside a dry bag.)
5. Don’t pack things in plastic bags. There are classier ways to organize stuff. Use laundry bags and, where necessary, waterproof camping bags.
6. Only use ATMs at proper banks and during opening hours. That way you have options when the card gets eaten, as it will eventually.
7. Pack a water filter, or a kettle, so that you can drink tap water anywhere, for free, without polluting the earth with plastic. (A win-win in theory, but apparently this one has not yet occurred to much of humanity.)
8. Don’t book more than a night or two’s accommodation at the same place. There is almost always space for a second night, especially if it is just a hostel bed. No need to close off your options. If staying a while, then use the internet tariff as a base to negociate a lower cash rate.
9. Take your shower at night if you are using your own towel. That way the towel will be dry by the time you need to pack it.
10. Don’t buy souvenirs, or anything else. Lugging junk around on your back for months on end is all kinds of silly.

As any of its gazillion visitors will know, Barcelona is full of flags: Catalan ones, red and yellow, hanging from every window. A few years ago Catalonia held a pseudo-referendum on independence (which was pseudo-won). Scotland and Quebec have each had multiple real referendums. Apparently all three countries will keep voting every decade or two until, one day, the separatists get their way.

This is a silly situation. In Catalonia, as in Quebec and Scotland, the sensible majority does not want full sovereignty, which means paying for armies and embassies and bureaucracies in the name of an abstract principle. But it is not looking for perks either. Extreme decentralization (Spain), full linguistic equality (Canada) or advantageous tax arrangements (the UK) will never be enough. Because what Catalans and Quebeckers and Scots really want is simple: recognition that their nations are equal among others. Unfortunately, since the 19th century that means having a state.

The solution is therefore clear. The international community must create, by means of a UN treaty, a new status of confederation. The accession requirement would be a UN-certified set of rights for confederation members, including taxation. Crucially, membership of confederations would be voluntary and provisional, carrying the right of full secession. Existing and aspiring regions could apply for the status, and accepted members would be represented in relevant UN bodies.

At last the combustible bond between nations and states would be weakened. An internationally respected alternative to traditional statehood would emerge, allowing nations to assert their dignity as siblings rather than children. Traditional unitary (and federal) states could continue to prosper, and inspire allegiance. But in other cases identities might be recognized for what they are: multiple, not binary. In extreme cases civil wars might be averted. At the very least the Catalans of Barcelona might at last put away their flags.

Non-fiction writing is broken.

The aim of most non-fiction is not to recount facts or tell a story but to convince. The average work on economic theory, or international relations, or the environmental crisis, does not need to be 300 pages long. Authors typically spend reams of text fastidiously laying out a cornucopia of evidence in support of a handful of arguments, when most readers would be content with just a sample – after all, they have already expressed confidence in the author by buying his book. Asking readers to wade through hundreds of pages in order to prove a few points is like making software users read source code.

Here’s a solution. Non-fiction content should, like reference works, come in a selection of formats. For example, Thomas Piketty’s doorstop Capital in the 21st Century could be be published in parallel as a long-form article and even a video, for example. Experts could continue to slog through the original, just as programmers examine source code. But newcomers and other laypeople would have other options. More people would be reached and convinced.

Of course, back in the real world there is a problem. The model for financing short-form content has been broken by the internet. Authors publish overweight books for a reason. But that problem is for another day.

As a few pure-hearted American progressives prepare to undermine their 230-year-old republic for the sake of their consciences, let me offer them a crash lesson on democracy.

Democracy, in its liberal form, is about reconciling different interests and opinions. That means one thing: compromise. In a democracy with proportional representation you may freely vote your conscience, knowing that your representatives in parliament will then get their hands dirty by compromising, on your behalf, in order to form a government. But in a presidential and majoritarian system like America’s, there is only room for two factions. To avoid unfair election results, the compromise must be done upstream, by voters themselves at primaries and caucuses, so as to produce the two alternatives the electoral system can handle. In America, election day is too late to be voting your conscience!

Politics is not shopping. You will not get exactly what you want, you will get the result of a compromise. American liberals and progressives had a chance to make their case in the Democrat primaries last year. They now need to suck it up and vote for the decision their own side made.

In politics the word “liberal” is even more ambiguous than its synonym, “free”. Most would agree that it has something to do with rights. But among the three countries which invented the whole concept, agreement stops there.

In America, liberalism implies a big state which helps poor people. In Britain it has kept its original association with free markets and individual rights. And in France “libéral” is used as a term of abuse against supposed free-market fundamentalists.

At least all this is easy to remember. The three definitions mutate handily from West to East in step with the political spectrum: US (left), Britain (center), France (right).

Which leaves us with the equally difficult task of defining left and right, but that is another question.

Factory farming is the cruel industrial revolution of the last half-century, I’ve discovered from Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals (2008). Over 99% of all farming in the rich world has, quite suddenly, become industrial. House prices and car prices have increased 14 or 15 times, but chicken prices have barely doubled. We now eat cheaply what we most want to eat: meat.

We all know the factor of adjustment. It is the animals.

To make cheap bacon, sows are imprisoned in body-sized crates. To make cheap beef, slaughtered cows are bled while still alive – legally, since the food industry wrote the ambiguous law. Above all, billions of industrial chickens lead lives of pure misery and suffering, from beginning to awful end. Modern broiler chickens live for 5 or 6 weeks, in darkness, barely able to move, kept alive by antibiotics – the least costly solution – before being tossed into a crate for slaughter. A large fraction of them do not die at the official instant of slaughter, but rather before and after it, presumably in terrible pain. Most male chicks of laying chickens, by definition superfluous to demand, are simply pulped at birth, literally. At every stage of these processes, animals risk additional cruelty by the overworked humans processing them. Cruelty, systematic and gratuitous, is what made possible this industrial revolution.

But cruelty is not the only unpriced externality of factory farming. There is also the cost to public health. In the USA farmed animals produce 130 times more waste than humans, without the benefit of a sewage system. Inside factory sheds and slaughterhouses, pollution and pathogens can only be controlled by antibiotics, an aberrant situation which undermines humanity’s defences against future disease pandemics.

Most of all, industrial meat farming is an environmental disaster. Instead of feeding people directly, most agricultural crops in the rich world are fed to animals. The industry consumes vast quantities of often-precious water, and land which could otherwise be wilderness. And it emits more carbon than all transport.

Factory farming is thus completely unsustainable in a world of 9 billion. The Earth will eventually “shake it off like a dog shakes off fleas”, says Jonathan Safran Foer. Until then, the industrial-scale pollution and suffering go on.

What does the author advocate? Selective omnivory, perhaps: he quotes non-factory farmers, who believe that “humans can provide animals with a better life and death than they could hope for in the wild”. Vegetarianism, maybe: eating meat is perhaps compatible with animal welfare, but not with animal rights. Refusing meat is also a pragmatic answer to the real-world scarcity of non-factory produce. Ultimately veganism is the least ambiguous response.

But Jonathan Safran Foer advocates none of these things. He just wants a public debate. The meat industry, which keeps its factories locked down against camera-wielding intruders, did not even respond to his terrible accusations. It does not want that debate, and neither do we.

Humans are incoherent to the point of schizophrenia. The factory farmer claims that “family farms will not sustain a world of ten billion” – but that is an excellent argument for vegetarianism. The traditional farmer raises animals as a commercial endeavor, but claims not to regard his animals as a commodity. And we consumers are the most egregious hypocrites of all. We pamper our pets and idealize nature, while martyrising our farm animals and despoiling the environment. We are outraged by the idea of animal cruelty, but continue to pay for it daily.

Factory farming is an excellent challenge to our moral integrity, since almost nobody is asking us to do the right thing. “Do you eat chicken because you know the science and have decided their suffering is acceptable, or because it tastes good?”, asks Jonathan Safran Foer. The question is horribly easy to answer.

Economic growth is the closest thing there is to a global religion. Rich and poor, left and right, Christians and Muslims and Buddhists and sub-Saharan animist pagans – everyone except a handful of greens is certain that growth is the answer to life, universal prosperity and almost everything else. Because government investment. Because consumer buying power. And above all because jobs.

In the rich world, jobs are the only serious reason left for believing. The growth god is invoked in response to every new quarterly unemployment statistic, often as something to be “kickstarted” by some or other government initiative involving lower taxes or lighter regulation.

This is strange. After all, if jobs really are the ultimate objective, then ways can certainly be found to create them without recourse to constantly rising economic activity. Investment and deregulation in job-creating sectors, for example.

So why not ditch the growth proxy and just worship at the shrine to jobs instead? Endless growth has unpleasant side effects and is clearly unsustainable in the long term. Full employment is no panacea either, but it surely makes for a more rational deity.

I have an unreducible pile of paper books that I can’t bear to send for recycling, even though they are as cluttersome and unsearchable as all paper books. What will become of them? I’m starting to get a clearer idea, after hearing about a start-up which charges to digitize your books, recycling them in the process (for the obvious reason of copyright). There’s clearly a chunky opportunity here for the big players – after all, they already have my books on their hard drives. What’s stopping them offering a book-disappearing service? The law, probably, but that will change. And greed – they’ll make sure to exhaust the supply of suckers who are prepared pay for a digital copy of the book they already own. I can wait. And if it takes too long, I’ll find another way to get a digital copy of the content I paid for. An infinitely cheaper way.

The tablet should be a revolution for independent travel. We’re not quite there yet. Here’s my checklist of the necessary functionality, along with my experience during a recent trip to Spain.

• Self-geolocation. I used downloaded OpenStreetMap (OSM) maps on Osmand (for Android). GPS worked great and I never got lost.
• Map search, to find destinations quickly. Basically impossible except with Google Maps and a data connection. So at this point we are using two separate maps.
• Plan the itinerary on the go. I used a Rough Guide on Kindle, which was good for quality information, but there was a major problem – I could not plot the itinerary on my map. Not directly (no map coordinates API in Kindle), and not even manually in the Google Maps app (no feature to do it).
• Book accommodation and transport on the go. I didn’t attempt transport, but the Booking.com app was good for hotels – except the usual problem. Impossible to plot locations on my own offline map, except manually after laboriously cross-referencing from Booking.com’s map! Where’s the API?
• Protect private data against theft of the tablet. Since access to an email account opens the door to an online identity, this is a major consideration. I had two-factor protection: a screen lock, and a remote wiping service which works if you or the thief haven’t disconnected data. The combination seems quite secure.

Ubiquitous affordable high-speed data would make things easier for travellers, and OSM data still has to beat Google Maps in terms of usability. But one fix needs to happen now. That is an open API for map coordinates, to share location data between apps and maps. A decent proposal exists already! Let’s use it.