In many countries, my own included, graduating from university means popping on a gown and mortar board to receive your graduation diploma.

Scenes sich as those above will be familiar to many of you, and I’m guessing that a fair proportion of the SLN readership have thrown their graduation mortar boards in the air themselves.

They do it slightly differently in Scandinavia.

Above are Danish students wearing their graduation caps. Just across the water, in Sweden, the headgear is the same, just in a different colour, the caps seeming to replicate the colours of the relative country’s flags.

Classmates will write their names in your grad cap, an item that has its own customs and traditions.

The student cap is a very much a tradition in Denmark, and there is a long list of special traditions attached to the cap:

– It is bad luck to wear the cap before you have passed your final exam

– You write your last grade inside the cap

– Classmates and friends write messages in the cap

– Tooth marks on the shade of the cap mean good luck

– The students with the biggest and smallest cap in a class have to buy a round of beer for their classmates

– You get a notch in the shade if you throw up because you have drunk too much

– If  you jump in the harbour wearing only the cap you get a drawing of a wave in your cap

– Drinking a case of beer in less than 24 hours allows you to wear a beer capsule as a tassel for the cap.

Suitably emboldened, Honey takes to ‘the harbour’ wearing just her ‘studenterhue’, entitling her to have a wave badge added to her cap

I rather like the idea of this graduation tradition rather than my own wearing of a gown, on one of the hottest days of summer, all those years ago!

Ella