I meant to write about the little bit of England I am in now, a part few people know except as tourists.  Instead, I got involved with Margaret Thatcher.

So now that it is has come to the last day of my blog, I shall at least give you a tiny glimpse of life in this ancient fishing-village, where the fishing boats still go out daily to catch fish, as well as crabs and lobsters.

            The boats are fewer now, and many of the old fishing families have turned to the tourist trade.  In the summer, they move out of their houses and live in a large shed in the garden, or at the back of the house, or with friends, while they let their houses to tourists or take in guests for Bed and Breakfast. The permanent population of the village is no more than about a thousand, but in the summer or in the school holidays the narrow, winding and steep main street can get so full of tourists that it is hard to make your way up or down it. Many of the old village houses, centuries-old “two up, two down” cottages, have also been bought up by second-home owners from London or Birmingham, who come down for week-ends. The village needs them all – you can’t make a living out of fish any more, and what they earn in the Season hopefully sees them through the winter – but it breathes a sigh of relief when the coaches leave at 5 o’clock, or the Tourist Season comes to an end, and the villagers are left to their own lives.

            Tourism has altered the village. There are still two thriving fish shops, and a shellfish shop where you can watch the women cleaning the crabs every day, but most of the other shops, like the butcher’s, the grocer’s, the chemists or the newsagent’s now sell icecreams or Cornish pasties, shells and other souvenirs, as well as children’s buckets and spades for the beach. If you want anything else, you either go to the small supermarket at the top of a steep hill, or you drive or take the bus into the market town twenty minutes away by car.  The bus goes twice a day.  If you want a bigger town or a train station, you have roughly an hour’s drive in front of you.

            So this is a rather different England to the one most visitors see. In fact, it is even wrong to call it England. This is Cornwall and the Cornish are Celts, like the Welsh and the Scots, or the Bretons in France.  The Cornish are fiercely proud of being Cornish and not English. Like any small, tight-knit community, it can take a long time to be accepted into the village here, especially if you are not Cornish. The people are wary of “incomers”, those from “up country”, “emmets” (the old Cornish word for “ants”), are all phrases they use to refer to them. A stranger has to become accepted and known. He or she has to have a reputation for not exploiting the place, for spending money in the village by using the local shops and the local workers, for paying bills in full and on time, for giving to local charities and good causes, and also attending local events and giving time to help with them – in short, for being a friend of the village. In return, you will be greeted warmly everywhere you go; if you need help, they will give it freely and at once; they will ask after your health and your family; and they will make you feel welcome whenever you come. You will never, of course, be Cornish, and never quite a villager, but nor should you expect to be.

            The local families have mostly been here for centuries, and, as in any village, they know a great deal about each other, both past and present generations. They know about old and new scandals, they know who makes the best cakes, who always visits the lonely, who was married to whom, who got divorced and why, who is a miser and who is generous. They do not all like each other, of course, but they are a strong community, and if disaster strikes, they will forget everything else and band together in support of one of their own.

            There is an example of this at the moment. About a month ago, a local builder called Trevor, a man with a lovely tenor voice, went off with a group of other men from the village to sing some of the traditional sea songs at a concert not far from London. While they were rehearsing, an iron door weighing over two tons suddenly crashed down on two of them - one of them was the manager of the group, the other was Trevor.  The manager died outright; Trevor died on his way to hospital. The group whom the iron door had just missed were all friends of his: they had all been at school together, their families had known each other all their lives. Trevor had mended this person’s roof, had built that person’s porch, had repaired or built things all over the village. He had often done work for me too, and I liked him very much. He was a member of the volunteer life-boat crew and rowed in the village longboat. He was cheerful, kind and friendly to all, a central part of village life. A cloud of shock and grief was still hanging over the place when I came, his men friends can barely smile. It is a close society – the kind that Margaret Thatcher denied existed – and people stand by each other, as they now try to help Trevor’s wife and three sons.

            I heard today that Trevor is buried up in the churchyard of the beautiful local 15^th century church, which stands almost alone on top of a hill. The majority of the names on the graves are those of local families, and there are several which are marked “Lost at sea”.  It is a lovely and atmospheric place, although rather overgrown, like most country cemeteries in England.  It is blowing a gale at the moment, but tomorrow I will go up there and put a candle on Trevor’s grave as the Finns do at Christmas.

            So, unexpectedly, this blog ends with the death of two people: one an English Prime Minister, one a local Cornish builder in the village where I am privileged to live when in the UK. Two very different people, two very different aspects of Britain.

            Soon the time will come to leave this home in a Cornish fishing-village, and return to my other home in Esbo –neither of them are a second home, because I love both equally. For I am also privileged to have two countries: Britain and Finland.

            Goodbye. It has been a pleasure talking to you, whoever you are out there, but for now I shall leave blogging and return to writing what I hope will be my next book.

            Hoppas at våren kommer snart till Finland också.  Vi hörs!

Diana

The Grocer’s Daughter

            It’s difficult to get away from the subject of Margaret Thatcher in England at the moment. Now the papers are full of the coming funeral. She had planned the funeral service herself, well in advance. This is a very sensible thing to do, as it saves one’s relatives a lot of worry when the time comes, and, in her case, it must be saving a lot of argument amongst others, too. She has chosen traditional hymns every English-speaking Christian knows, readings from the old King James’ Bible, and has asked for there to be no Eulogy – saying that people should come to worship God, not her. The Prime Minister will do one of the readings, not because it is David Cameron, a Conservative as she was, but because she requested that whoever was “the current Prime Minister” should do it. Fair enough. In fact, it seems to me a faultless choice of funeral service. Most people are hoping it will not be accompanied by demonstrations outside St Paul’s Cathedral, and so do I.

            One thing that has struck me about all the articles I have now read about her is the frequency with which she has been called “the grocer’s daughter”, or references made to the fact that she started life as the daughter of a grocer and rose to be Prime Minister.  This seems to me so typically English, caught as England still is in the sticky mess of Class – who your parents are or were, where they stood in the social hierarchy, what kind of school you went to, what kind of accent you have, and so on.  A “grocer’s daughter” defines Margaret Thatcher as being bang in the middle-class, her father a shop-keeper, “in trade” as it used to be called with a disparaging undertone. It also conveys that she was “not out of the top drawer”, i.e. not from the upper or even professional classes.  She went, too, to a grammar school – so not to a girls’ public school, which would have meant her father could afford the fees -  and mentioning that even suggests she might have had an inferior education.  In fact, grammar schools in Thatcher’s day usually gave their lucky pupils an excellent education, which public schools by no means always did. As always, it depended on the school. From grammar school, Thatcher went on to study chemistry at Oxford, and then to start “climbing the ladder” to the very political top.

            A comparison that springs to my mind from English literature and history is when the writer Richard Sheridan, who wrote probably the most successful comedy ever, the School for Scandal, became an MP in the 18^th century.  He was also the manager of a theatre at the time. When he rose to make his first speech, and on many occasions after that, he was jeered at for being in the theatre world and so, other members thought, not fit to be in Parliament.  “Not one of us”. The parliamentary scene has changed since then, but not entirely, it seems, and the comment made when Thatcher entered parliament that she was “a grocer’s daughter” has the same ring to it as the comments on Sheridan.

            When the media so constantly note her background, it surely indicates surprise that she was able to rise to such heights. Otherwise, why mention it?  It has struck me that no Finn would think it surprising in Finland - or I don’t think so. It doesn’t seem to matter what jobs were done by the parents of people like Katainen, Niinistö or Lehtonen, for example, or where they went to school. It has always seemed to me one of the most attractive things about Finns that for the most part people are considered equal whatever their background. Would anyone in Finland really think it surprising or worth stressing that a grocer’s son or daughter could rise to be Prime Minister?  I think they would take the possibility for granted.

The Iron Lady

            I arrived in England the day Maggie Thatcher died. She had led a Conservative government in Britain in the 70s and 80s for eleven and a half years, and is still the longest-serving post-war Prime Minister. She changed Britain, probably forever.  I imagine the obituaries had long since been written, as for the last few years her health had been bad. Still, it was interesting for me to read them, and also to hear the speeches about her yesterday in Parliament, which had been recalled from its Easter holiday to commemorate  her. Not that all the speakers did, for Maggie Thatcher had inspired love and hate in almost equal amounts.

             I dipped in and out of England during her reign - and it was definitely a reign, as she almost, but never quite, outqueened the Queen. I watched the political and social scene develop, seeing it partly as an outsider, partly as someone who was British, too.  I was appalled at her apparent indifference to the suffering of whole communities and families when she broke the Trade Unions and closed mines throughout the country. I deplored her decision to stop free milk for children in schools.  I was horrified when she declared war on the Falklands – not so much by the act (I did not know enough to judge it) but by her own belligerence, and by her obvious enjoyment in being “a war leader”.  That happened while my children and I were living back in England for a year, and I watched despairingly the same old propaganda machine grinding into action and the Argentinians becoming “the enemy” overnight, while young soldiers wrote THIS ONE’S FOR YOU, ARGIES on their missiles. I had seen it all as a child in the Second World War and had thought never to see it again.

            But, more than anything, I hated what I saw happening to the attitudes and values of young people in that period. One day, when my two teenage nephews were staying with me, we started a discussion on the subject of happiness.  I turned to the 15-year-old:

            “And what does happiness mean for you?” I asked.

            He answered without hesitation: “Money!”

It made me very sad. “Thatcher’s child”, I thought. Because Margaret Thatcher believed wholeheartedly that it was the individual who was important and not society.  In fact on one occasion she said outright: “There is no such thing as society”. She actively encouraged a “me-culture”, whereby people should think of themselves, of their own advancement, and not of others.  The attitude is still with us today, and I find it hard to forgive this erosion of human values and the human spirit.

            When she became the first woman Prime Minister Britain had ever had, it seemed both amazing and wonderful – a sign that women were at last being recognised as equal. It proved no such thing. Somebody said yesterday: “Margaret Thatcher broke through the glass ceiling – and then pulled up the ladder behind her.”  She only ever appointed one woman Minister in her cabinets and much preferred working with men – preferably those who agreed with her. The position of women was in no way improved during her time.

            Yet, despite all these things I held against her, together with her terrible, affected voice (though that was hardly her fault) and the “Don’t argue – I’m right” manner, it was hard not to admire her. She was undeniably a great politician and a great international figure.  She was a charismatic and forceful leader to whom other nations paid attention. It was the Russians who first called her The Iron Lady. They meant it as an insult; characteristically, she took it as a compliment.

Thanks to her, Britain got out of the psychological and economic depression it had been in.  She was a major figure within the EU, championing Britain at every point. She was one of the people instrumental in ending the Cold War. And she was, too, one of the very first world leaders to point out the dangers of climate change.

            She divided Britain as no other figure has done that I can remember in my lifetime. The Irish and the Scots comprehensively loathed her, and the English were torn into two different camps.  They still are. She is to be given a Ceremonial Funeral and not a State Funeral next Wednesday, and this has once again caused controversy.  Some feel she deserves a State Funeral, as was given to Winston Churchill; some think that a Ceremonial Funeral, as given to the The Queen Mother and to Princess Diana, is the most suitable; some don’t think she should be given either. To me, as to most people, there frankly seems little difference between the two, anyway.  The Wednesday occasion will be very military, with 700 troops involved. Is that suitable or not, the papers ask? And the guest list is being questioned too.  In death, as in life, she is a controversial figure.

            Meanwhile, a group on Facebook  has been preparing for the occasion for six years.  They suggested that the moment Thatcher died, people should download the song “Ding! Dong! The witch is dead” from The Wizard of Oz. It is in itself a very innocuous song, of course, but not right now.  The result of the campaign has been that the song has just hit this week’s Number 3 slot in the charts, so that the BBC and other companies that regularly play the top hits have to decide whether to play it and risk an outcry of “Outrageous!  Offensive! Insensitive!”, or to exercise self-censorship and thereby go against the principle of Freedom of Speech or, in this case, Freedom of Song.  Witch or no, the Iron Lady still makes waves.

            Ah! England in the springtime! But this time, not quite. Coming in on the plane over south-east England, I could see it was still a muddy brown colour and that the trees were bare. March has been the coldest for fifty years, and snow is still lying on the hills in the North, causing the sheep farmers much misery with sheep dying in the drifts and lost lambs.

            As I took the long train journey down to the south-west, though, the grass grew slightly greener and there were indeed lambs gambolling (a special word for how little lambs behave) in the fields. When I reached my destination, it was dark, so I couldn’t really see what lay outside the headlights of my friend’s car.

            In the morning I drew the curtains and looked out in wonder. Across the narrow bay below me, greeny-brown grass rose in slopes above the dark brown rocks, and a herd of cattle was grazing on it.  Beyond the headland stretched the Atlantic, and a morning mist lightly powdered the pale blue sky and the sea. A fishing-boat chugged out into it, seagulls circling round its wake. 

            I went for a short walk along the cliff and saw that daffodils were in the gardens and crowding the hedges and ancient stone walls, seemingly wild, though someone must have planted the first one long, long ago. They should have been long over by now, but are here for me today. Yesterday was the first frost-free day in Cornwall this season, and today’s temperature of 12C was last known in November. Everyone I meet tells me how cold it has been, but they cannot know how it feels to come from the half metre of snow in my garden in Finland, and from ice so slippery underfoot that I haven’t been able to walk normally outside for months. A minor miracle.

TRAVEL TIPS

            Packing to go somewhere is always a problem. Coming back is not usually one, unless you are returning loaded with presents and other things you have bought abroad, in which case there will be the problem of trying to fit them all in. Otherwise, you just have to take back everything you first brought with you when you started. Ah, but have you remembered them all, or is that convertor plug for England still in its socket in the wall, or your pills in the bathroom?

            The most useful travel tip I have ever had was to make a permanent list of essentials to take, and to save it onto your computer. Then, each time you go away, you can print it out and tick off the items one by one. If you print out two,  you will have another for the return journey, so that you remember to take things back. There is by now an APP for this, as there is for everything, but it looks to me far more complicated than making up my own simple list. I have a primary and a secondary one, depending if I am going for a very short time or a longer period, and I also have a Variable section, depending where I am going: do I need a swimsuit or winter vests, for instance? This may make me sound very organised, which I am not really, but it has saved me so much time and trouble each time I travel that it has been well worth doing it. 

            The second immensely useful tip I read was to have a washbag already filled with bathroom essentials: a toothbrush, small tube of toothpaste, travel soap, earplugs, nailfile, etc – whatever you usually need.  Then, if you suddenly have to go away for the night – or if you are just setting off on a journey – you can  pick it up and put it in your case as it is, without having to collect all the separate items up from scratch.

            Lastly – and this is my own tip – give some thought to your hand luggage on a plane if you are also travelling with luggage in the hold. Anything which is vital should be in your hand luggage, in case the hold luggage goes astray or is lost forever. “Vital” can include something like medicine, or your address book (if not on your mobile), or, for a writer like me who likes to handwrite notes and even bits of a book that come to me at odd times, it could be something handwritten that has yet to be copied or put on a computer and which you are going to need at your destination.

            I also warmly recommend that you slip in a toothbrush and a pair of knickers. This is a tip gained from an embarrassing experience.  Four times in the past few years, I have arrived at an airport but my luggage hasn’t.  This has happened twice when going to London and twice when returning to Helsinki. It didn’t matter very much when I was returning home, but it did matter very much once in London.

             I had arrived on a Sunday evening and was due to attend four days of meetings, beginning at 9 a.m. on the Monday morning. I went to the baggage hall to collect my bag, which had clothes for the four days, plus a quantity of the papers and pamphlets needed for the meetings. Round and round went the baggage carousel, as I vainly peered into the mouth-like hole which spat forth suitcase after suitcase, but never mine. I was left standing alone, luggageless.  I then spent a long time at a desk trying to find out what had happened, until an official was able to tell me that it seemed never to have left Helsinki. “You’ll get it by tomorrow’s plane,” he said comfortingly. It didn’t comfort me, as I knew that before that – if it did arrive – I would have had to be at my first meeting. But there was nothing to do but go off to my hotel.

            I realised that I had nothing for the night - no nightwear, no toothbrush and toothpaste – nor did I have any clothes except the ones I was wearing, and of course no clean underwear. The hotel, though, was not far from Waterloo Station in London, so I thought I would go there to get a pair of knickers for the morning and the toothbrush, etc, as I knew the station had several shops open in the evening. Not on a Sunday, though.  There was only one small shop that was brightly lit up and which turned out, amazingly, to sell knickers – of a sort. These knickers seemed to be entirely made up of tiny scraps of see-through scarlet-red or black lace, and seemed to be more designed to be taken off rather than to be put on. They also appeared to be made for anorexic teenagers rather than for mature matrons and would certainly not fit me. In the end I decided that men’s boxer shorts would be preferable. So the next day saw me attending my very formal and serious meetings wearing a pair of men’s boxers, with the happy thought that they could instead have been scarlet lace mini-minis.

            Each day, I asked vainly for my luggage. It did not arrive until the day before I left, so, although I was able to go out later and buy a few things, somehow I had to get through the meetings without any papers and also without the notes I had made for a speech I had to give. As I said, always have handwritten notes and a spare pair of knickers in your hand luggage.

            Since I’m about to go to England, a kind friend emailed me advising me to bring my winter woollies. “It’s perishingly cold here,” she said.  This is not what you would expect in April, and I was certainly not expecting it. In my imagination the grass will be green, the blossom will be out, and there will be tiny white lambs wagging their tails and springing into the air.  I’ll tell you if there are when I get there, because I will still be blogging for a bit.

            When my friend said that I thought of the old English rhyme:

Cast not a clout, till May be out , which means you shouldn’t start taking off your (warm) clothes  - “clout” being an old word for clothing – until either it is the end of May or the mayflower blossom is over, depending which meaning you favour. This, like many weather sayings, is sensible advice even today. It is not just “an old wives’ tale”.

            The modern world is not with out its “new wives’ tales”, though, and they are certainly not confined to women and wives, men being equally given to them. A lot of them are to do with food and what it does or doesn’t do for you. Very often they are ones about cancer.  I remember being told by the newspapers in Finland that the reason the English put milk in their tea was to prevent cancer. Whatever can have caused this ridiculous idea?  They have been putting milk in their tea long before the causes of cancer were even thought of, and they still do without any relation to cancer.  Another new wives’ tale in Finland some time ago was that having cheese and coffee together also caused cancer. What next?

            When I was young, butter and milk were considered vital for the bones of growing children, but not so long ago, we were told that butter was bad for you, and a lot of people started banning butter in their homes, as well as whole milk and fatty cheeses. It was certainly good news for the makers of butter substitutes, if not for the farmers. Now that has been reversed, and butter is again good for you and for growing children, and better in fact than butter substitutes.  Of course I mean in reasonable and not excessive amounts – nobody is suggesting an overdose of butter and milk products is healthy, and of course it is not good at all for some people. But surely that is true of most foods?

            Food news sells, though, since people these days are very concerned about their health, and magazines thrive on health pages, diets, food warnings, and so on. Let’s not forget that the food industry is a very powerful one these days. We should all be a little sceptical about the latest piece of food research and find out more about the basis for it and how impartial the researchers have been before we start accepting it as a proved fact. And, as in everything, common sense is the best guide.

            “You’re as old as you feel” is a cliché. Nevertheless, it is true, as clichés often are.  It’s my belief that you seldom feel the age you are, whatever that age may be. When you are eighty, you can sometimes feel at least a hundred. Sometimes you can feel eighteen, though, and then when you look in the glass it can come as a nasty shock to see you definitely are not, but some strange old person who isn’t you.

            With a great many people, their inside age stops at a certain point. After I was 28, I went on feeling 28 for many years. It was only when I was in my fifties that it changed to about 35; and now I think it is somewhere in my forties. It has of course no relation whatsoever to what you look like on the outside.

            I have an idea that the reverse is true when you are very young: that inside you feel much older than your years. That toddler who throws himself onto his back and drums his little legs against the floor in fury probably feels he is much older than two and a half, and that is what enrages him. He should, he feels, be allowed to do more grown-up things, but his body won’t let him yet, or his parents won’t. And we all know how often teenagers feel completely grown-up inside. I wonder if there ever comes a point when a person feels exactly the age he or she is. I can’t remember one myself.

            There are other ways in which the number of birthdays is no clue to a person’s real age.  I have known people of 26 who were middle-aged – and vice-versa. “Act your age!” we say reprovingly, but exactly what do we mean?  Does a fifty-year-old have to conform to what we expect of someone age fifty?  And what is that and why do we expect it?  Surely a hundred and fifty years ago someone of forty or fifty would be expected to behave in a very different way to what would be expected today. The same is true of a 14-year-old.

            And how old do you feel yourself, inside? 

            Yesterday, the radio told me, was the coldest Easter Sunday in Britain since records began. Minus 11C up in the north somewhere, and the cold weather is forecast to go on there till mid-April. When you think that daffodils are usually out in February, this is astonishing – and worrying.

            Here in Finland we have beaten a sun record for March, it seems, so that has been a delight.  Despite all the snow being turned into ice – the road up to my house is unwalkable, as it is covered by a sheet of ice shining in the sun – nature at least knows it is spring.  The snow below the house is cut with hare tracks, but no longer straight, purposeful ones but by mad, looped trails circling the old apple trees.  “Mad as a March hare” the English say, and they do look mad. Is it some kinf of courting dance?

            Sebastian has also made an unexpected appearance. Sebastian is our resident pheasant, though of course he is probably the great-great-great-great grandson of the original Sebastian I named 32 years ago, when we first moved here. (How long is the normal life of a pheasant?). He came strutting up my snow path in that arrogant, lord-of-the-earth way pheasants have and which was why I called him Sebastian. This one looks rather young, though, so perhaps he has recently ousted his father as Lord of my Garden. Pheasants are very territorial, I have noticed, and though there may be two cock pheasants around for a short while, there is very soon only one. I expect Sebastian will shortly be followed by the harem he seems to collect each year, and later by his chicks, which roll in the flowerbeds when dry and crush the growing shoots.  I will curse Sebastian later, when he stands on a particular small rock and wakes me up too early by shrieking his mastery of the land and challenging all rivals, but , at the same time, I acknowledge his equal, if not superior right to this territory.

            One of the joys of having a garden is seeing the return of the regular pairs of birds to claim their rights to this particular spot.  I have a pair of blackbirds, a pair of jays, two pairs of blue tits, and at any rate one woodpecker, all of which always see off other claimants to this spot.  I also have several magpies, which I would rather not have, but which the other birds only protest against, not daring to see them off too. The wagtail has yet to arrive – a descriptive name, for that is exactly what it does: wags its tail, I mean.

            I’m off to England soon, so I’ll miss a lot, I expect – spring is so sudden in Finland – but there is at least a chance of England warming up in the meantime, so I may get a sudden spring there too.

            Yesterday, Good Friday, would have been the day for making Hot Cross Buns in England. I used to make them as a child, and I only have to say the words to conjure up the delicious, mouth-watering smell of them baking. They are really the closest we have to Finnish bulle: the same size and spices, but Hot Cross Buns also have currants or sultanas (called white raisins in the Finnish shops) and they come marked with a cross on top to commemorate Good Friday. These days they are sold in plastic packs of four, like everything else, and the cross is made with commercial almond paste or icing, but the home-made ones were with a cross made by cutting it into the buns before they went into the oven. We only ate them at Easter, specially on Good Friday. Now the season goes on for a long time both before and after the Easter celebrations. I am glad they still aren’t available all the year round, though. Once that is done, what was once Celebration Food becomes no longer special. 

            Hot Cross Buns even have their own ancient rhyme, which was shouted out by the street sellers in the old days:

            Hot Cross Buns!  Hot Cross Buns!

            If you have no daughters, give them to your sons.

            One a penny, two a penny, Hot Cross Buns!

I like the idea that the daughters come first.

            The other English Easter food is Simnel Cake, but that seems no longer to be eaten so much. There are lots of recipes which you can google, but they all include the ingredient of marzipan, as does old-fashioned Christmas Cake. I imagine this is because marzipan is made from ground almonds, which were an expensive and rare luxury in past centuries. Is that the reason for the almond in the Finnish Christmas rice porridge or does that have some other symbolism?

            Finns have memmi and pasha for Easter.  On the Tuesday before Lent – Shrove Tuesday in English – both countries eat pancakes, but the English don’t have other things like a fastlagsbulle  and blinis.  We all have Easter eggs, of course, and Christmas always has a lot of special foods as well.

            All of these are foods associated with the major Christian Church Festivals, but I can’t at the moment think of any other special English foods which we only eat at certain times. Finland, on the other hand, has quite a number, such as mead (mjöd) and strudlar (untranslatable)  on May 1^st, or the Runeberg tarts we eat around Runeberg’s Day. There’s a Svinhufvud cake, too, but that’s eaten all the year round. Commemorating a famous writer by a cake is a charming idea. Why isn’t there a Shakespeare tart in April in England? But then, the English don’t have commemorative days for their writers, as Finns do on Runeberg’s Day or Alexis Kivi Day, and there are not many English people who remember when St George’s Day (our patron saint) is, let alone celebrate it.

            Finally, there is Thursday in Finland.  Pea soup and pancakes.  Every week. Wherever does that custom come from?

Tomorrow is Easter Sunday.  A very Happy Easter to you.

P.S.  Don’t forget you can comment in Swedish or Finnish as well as in English.

The Secrets of Long Life

            I think I’m betting a bit serious – heavy – in my blogs, so let’s have a change.

            As the latest Oldest Man/Woman in the World dies, there is bound to be a little piece in the newspapers where a journalist asks his/her successor for their secrets for living a long life. I notice it often involves yoghurt or something similar, but I think that’s because many of these Oldest People come from rather remote areas in one of the Stans, as I call countries whose names end with –stan, where such products are basic food. Or from Japan, although it must surely be rice there.  Food, at any rate, always forms part of the answer.  Whether they drink or not seems to have no bearing on it. In fact, it was rather comforting to hear that Jeanne Calment, the world’s oldest-ever woman, who died aged 122 in France, drank three glasses of wine daily.

           Perhaps the story people most enjoyed about Jeanne Calment, though, was the fact that when she was in her late eighties, her lawyer (or a life insurance man?) took out a policy whereby he would provide an annuity until her death and then inherit the rest of her money.  He had calculated that she was not likely to live beyond her late nineties. Instead, he found himself paying her for a further 25 years.  I may be a little shaky on the details of this story, but the substance is true.  How many of us would not enjoy our insurance companies paying us for a change?

            The most recent Oldest Man is Jiroemon Kimura from Japan, who is 115 and 242 days (days are always counted in these statistics).  Sure enough, there appeared a little article about him in my recent Weekly Guardian in which he revealed the secrets of his longevity.  There is a picture of him sitting upright in a chair, looking alert and well, and laughing his head off. His secrets, he says, are watching his food portions, waking early in the day, reading the newspapers, and watching parliamentary debates on television. I can believe the food portions, the waking early, and reading the newspapers, but watching parliamentary debates on television?  Reason to die at once, I would have thought. Or perhaps that’s why he’s laughing his head off.

            A little while ago, I went with a friend to see a British version of Hissvägraren, the play by Bengt Ahlfors, at the Swedish Theatre.  It’s a monologue really, but it feels like a play, which is what good monologues should do. And this is a very good one: it is both very funny and very sad, and it shows great understanding of childhood, loneliness and many other things.

            It was also very well translated – or at least it sounded as if it were written in English, as I have not read the text in order to be able to compare it. I wonder, though, how much work had been done on adapting the translation, since it was presumably first translated into American English.  I guess this from the title, My Elevator Days. As most people know, a “hiss” is  an“elevator” in American English, whereas in British English it is a “lift”.  In fact, the title was the one thing I didn’t like. I thought about it a long time, as I had just been blogging about titles.  To me, My Elevator Days  sounds very dull and boring, which the play is not.  Of course Hissvägraren  is a clever title with a play on words, which is always difficult to translate.  In the play, the actor has to say it himself, and in English he uses the term “a lift objector” and goes on to compare it to “a conscientious objector” (was that explanation in the original?). However, The Lift Objector as a title would not have been good, as it’s not obvious that it’s a play on words. 

            I tried to come up with a title myself – on the principle that if you criticize something, you should be able to suggest something better.  So I thought that in British English one could maybe call it Life with a Lift , which would be a play on another meaning of lift, as in “It gave me a lift” = “It made me feel better/happy”.  Or perhaps just Life in a Lift, which is at least catchy. This wouldn’t work in American English, of course.  I said that titles are usually very hard to get right.

            After the performance, I bumped into two of my former students at Helsinki University (always a joy). They were now pensioners like me, but still seemed the same despite the grey hair.  We talked about the Scottish actor, Alexander West, who had played the role created by the great Lasse Pöysti, and of how excellent the Scot had been. Completely different from L.P., they said, but just as good in his own way.  They told me that a friend of theirs had not come with them, because she could not bear to see someone other than L.P. play the part.  It is quite the opposite for me.  I find great pleasure in seeing the same play performed by different actors – the various Hamlets, King Lears and Macbeths remembered through my life.  A play, by its very nature, is dependent on the actors’ interpretation of the words, for very often they cannot know of the writer’s intentions. So an actor, if good, can open up to an audience new insights, new nuances, new aspects of a character, that have never been explored before, and so enrich the play immeasurably. 

What’s in a Name (3)

            It was of course Shakespeare who wrote: “What’s in name?” and continued: “A Rose by any other name would smell as sweet”.  I’m not sure that’s true of books. Yes, the book remains the same book inside, but it’s the name that often makes one pick it up and read it.

            In a recent blog, I was thinking about what book covers should do and what they shouldn’t. What makes a good cover and what makes a bad one, for instance?  My own feeling is that titles should do the same as covers:  they should catch your eye, make you interested in the book, give an idea of what the book is about, and – since this is about words and not pictures – appeal to your sense of language. Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express leaves you in no doubt that it is a detective story and where it all happens. Dick Francis, the former top jockey, who wrote dozens of crime stories with a horse-racing setting, called his first book Dead Cert, where a “ dead cert” is a racing expression for an “absolute certainty to put your money on”, but also, as a title, conveys the idea that it is a crime novel. In this title, too, it’s the appeal to the play on words that is also attractive. It’s “catchy”, as they say.

             What titles definitely should not do is mislead you as to their contents. It is not always deliberate. There are titles that turn out to be unintentionally misleading. Victoria Beckham’s recent Learning to Fly, for instance, might turn out to disappoint a prospective aviator, but I do not for a moment think she (or her publisher) intended to deceive – it just sounded a catchy title about the “high fliers” of the modern world.

            There are also very many titles that tell you nothing at all about the real contents. A great friend of mine pointed out that the name of the book which I wrote with my daughter, So Many Everests, might lead people to imagine it was about mountaineering.  We saw her point, but risked it nonetheless, as we hoped the plural “Everests” would indicate that it was about something else.  However, we understood when both the Finnish publisher and the later English one suggested subtitles: one was A Mother, A Daughter and a Dream, the other was From Cerebral Palsy to Casualty Consultant. I wouldn’t say either of them was catchy, but they were at least informative in their different ways.

            And then there can be titles which are there simply to make you buy the book and for nothing else. I had an example of this myself the other day.  I had written to a novelist friend in America, telling him I was going to see if I could find a publisher for Finland Forever in the UK.  I would have to change the title of course, I said, as British publishers seem only to be interested in books which have a very strong British connection, and the original title would put them off at once. I suggested one or two that he thought were rubbish, finally writing: “I know! I’ve just thought of the perfect title: A Virgin in Finland. That’s the one! That should sell.” Sell, yes maybe, but…

            He couldn’t see my laughter as I wrote back saying that although I thought it a title that might certainly sell, the problem would be that the buyer, who had no doubt thought he (it would probably be a “he”) had bought a book about steamy sex in a sauna with Santa, would be vastly disappointed in the contents, and would probably demand his money back for misrepresentation.

            Where was I?  Oh yes, book titles.

             I wonder how many people buying a book realise the time that has probably gone into trying the find exactly the right title? Very, very occasionally, it may come suddenly into your mind. More often than not, it takes weeks, months or at least the whole time you are writing it and even long after.

            How long did it take Shakespeare to find the title for his plays, I wonder?  He often had to produce them rather fast and can’t have had so much time to think. I imagine that Hamlet and Macbeth must have come to him pretty easily – or then it could have been because he couldn’t think of anything else. Twelfth Night was presumably called that because it was to be performed on Twelfth Night, but it has the subtitle of Or What you Will,  which rather indicates he was tired of dreaming up titles and so thought “call it anything you damn well want” – a title which a lot of authors would like to give their books. As You Like It is the same sort of thing.  I picture a conversation at the Globe going something like this:

            Actor: What’s the title of this new play, Will?

            W.S: I don’t know.

            Actor: But we have to call it something!

            W.S: Oh, call it anything you like.

            Actor: Come on, Will. Give us a title.

            W.S: I told you – it’s as you like it.

            Actor (writing on MS)  As You…

            Well, Shakespeare could get away with it; modern writers and publishers can’t. 

            After writing my last blog about book covers, I decided to google “the worst book covers” and see what came up.  There were a number of websites on the subject and I took a look at a few.  I decided that when people had selected their choice of “the worst”, it was much more about the titles than the covers.  Admittedly, there were some covers, mostly featuring people, with dreadful artwork, where the so-called artist had no idea how to draw people whatsoever and little idea how to draw in general. But it was the titles that seemed to have had the most influence on the choice.  So I began to think about the immense importance of a title in the world of publishing.

            I remembered that the Bookseller magazine, an English publication giving all the latest information on books, publishing and everything connected with it, runs a very popular competition at the annual Frankfurt Book Fair for The Oddest Title of the Year. Not the Worst, please note, but the Oddest. Amongst the winners have been Proceedings of the 2^nd International Workshop on Nude Mice (1978), Greek Rural Postmen and their Cancellation Numbers (1996), The Joy of Sex, Pocket Edition (1997) –  you will have to work that one out – Bombproof your Horse (2004),  and Manage your Dental Practice: the Gengis Khan way (2010).  The 2011 prize-winner was certainly amongst the oddest, as it was Cooking with Poo.  To appreciate this, you have to know that the common use of the word Poo in English is for “excrement”, as in “ some dog-owners never seem to pick up their dog poo but just leave it lying in the street”, so it was a rather disastrous choice for a title. How, I wonder, did the person who translated this Thai cookery book ever allow it to happen?  Mind you, I expect that some people bought the book just for the joy of having Cooking with Poo on their bookshelves.

(to be continued…) 

18 March 2013

An addition to today’s blog:

I see that the passport stamp is not visible in the photo on the website book jacket.  It is a small stamp, giving the date of my arrival in Finland, in the top right-hand corner. The theme of the cover, by the way, continues round to the back.

I’ve also just remembered that in English we have a saying “Don’t judge a book by its cover”, which means you shouldn’t judge people by how they appear on the outside .  The saying obviously reflects the feeling that book covers are notoriously deceptive about their contents.

18 March 2013

            Last Monday I got Finland Forever into my hands at last, and on Thursday I saw the Finnish version Ikuisesti Suomi  lying on a table, although I don’t have it myself yet.  It is a peculiar sensation to see those original drafts, draft after draft, of paper MSS finally become a physical, concrete object.  One opens it hesitantly, almost afraid to look inside. I don’t know about other writers, but I only think about the things that should have been there, but aren’t, or the things that are there that should probably have been left out, or better expressed. Too late now. But the thing about that book on the table that struck me at once was the cover.  In fact, the book jacket, because it’s a hardback, so it has a paper jacket.

            I had seen versions of it before while Anders Carpelan was working on it, but this was the final version, with the colours as they should be and the small extra details that he had thought up.  I think it is brilliant.  I also think that I am very lucky to have had Anders as the designer (he did the layout too), because I feel it does exactly what a book jacket or cover should do.

            What should it do?  For one thing, it should obviously catch the eye and look interesting enough for a potential reader to pick it up in a bookshop and start reading the blurb at the back, or flipping through the pages.  These days , we have the internet, so it is even more important that it catches the eye at once, even if you can’t pick it up, and that it makes the book look one that would interest you.  It should therefore give a strong indication what the book is about.  This doesn’t always happen.  I remember seeing a cover for a paperback edition of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, a story set in about 1790 of a 17-year-old girl who reads romantic terror novels - the rough equivalent of the vampire books of today - and learns that real life is not like that. The book cover shows a Victorian-style castle in the background; in the foreground a young couple, with the girl in Victorian dress, are kissing passionately under a tree in the moonlight. No such scene ever occurs in the book and anyone reading it expecting a tale of Romantic Love would be deeply disappointed, as it is a delightful satire on romantic young girls. Had the artist read anything of the book? I doubt it – he/she couldn’t even get the period right. A cover should definitely not mislead the reader.

            When doing the book jacket for Finland Forever, Anders Carpelan was initially faced with a  period problem.  The book is about Turku and Finland in 1952-3, so how do you make it immediately clear from the cover that it is not about the Finland of today or one which a tourist might pick up for information about life in Finland now?  He resolved the problem in a very clever and imaginative way, as you would see if you clicked onto the cover on this website.  I particularly like the detail of the passport stamp.

            It made me think a lot about covers and jackets, and about the whole appearance of a book. What makes a good cover?  What makes a bad one? Can you think of any outstandingly good or bad covers of books you know?  And, more importantly, why are they good or bad?

Another glorious March day. My English visitors last week were lucky enough to get almost unbroken sunshine and were enchanted.  Every morning, my friend Daphne would get up, go over to the living-room window, and repeat: “It’s just SO beautiful!” It was. A little light snow had fallen just before their arrival, covering up the dirty browns of the old snow. My garden was a perfect, blinding white, with only the tracks of animals covering it: hares, squirrels, and an ermine which I have occasionally glimpsed. They are difficult to spot, as they blend into the snow and are very fast. I thought ermines were confined to Lapland, but apparently not.

            March is making the right sounds, too:  not just the birds, but the whoosh! - whump! of packed snow sliding off my roof and onto the ground beneath, and the measured pit! pit! pit! of water dripping from the ever-lengthening icicle daggers along the gutters. The gutters have been warped and bent by the ice weighing them down. That means another spring of expensive repairs. Damn!

            My friend Daphne has spent four years in Finland long ago, so she knew what March could be like, even if she was surprised at first. Her daughter, on the other hand, had never visited Finland in winter. It was fun to watch and hear her reactions. She compared driving along the small roads near my house with driving through white tunnels, and the almost archaeological layers of snow at the side of the main roads she likened to an icecream cake.  I took them both to a café on the coast, so that she could go for a walk on the frozen sea. She was thrilled by the thought of the experience, but said it was almost impossible to believe that she was on the sea, as she hadn’t seen it when it was unfrozen. Seeing is believing?

            They left Finland with regret. I hear they have returned to rain, wind and only +3C in London, even if they report the crocuses and snowdrops are in flower. Late, they say.

            It’s just as well sometimes, when we grow heartily tired of so many months of “the white stuff”, to realise it can be startlingly beautiful and to try and look at it with the fresh eyes of a newcomer.

            I’ve just seen off an English friend and her daughter at the airport, which accounts for why I didn’t start my blog yesterday. It has been a hectic but fantastic week all round.  The friend came over specially for the launch of Finland Forever.  Book launches are very common in England, but not here in Finland, except for the very famous, so I had not expected to have one.  However, the British Ambassador here, a kind and imaginative man, suggested out of the blue that he should give me one at the Embassy residence. Naturally, I thought this a wonderful idea – and it was. There was a slight cliff-hanger, because it was not at all certain that the Finnish edition, Ikuisesti Suomi, would come from the printer’s in time, but it arrived the day before the launch, so all was well.

            I had asked my friend, Daphne, if she would like to come to Finland for it, and was thrilled when she said she would.  Finland Forever  is about my first year in Finland, 1952 -53, when I went to Turku/Åbo for nine months to be a Teacher/Secretary  for the Finnish-British Association there. Don’t worry – I’m not going to turn this into an advertisement for the book – the point is that Daphne also came out to be a Teacher/Secretary in 1952, and we met and made friends on the long trip out by ships and train to Finland. Daphne was to be a Teacher/Secretary in Savonlinna/Nyslott . Two years later she went to Turku/Åbo for another two years.  She stayed in the same family as I did, had the same office, taught and met some of the same people as I did. We have remained close friends ever since, so it seemed only appropriate that we should come full circle again here in Finland.

            Strangely, this was the first time we actually shared our memories of that first year. Once started, however, we could hardly stop -it was such fun to compare our similar and different experiences. One thing that struck us both forcibly was the peculiar behaviour of memory. Sometimes Daph would remember things of which I had not the faintest trace of recollection, at other times it would be my turn to remember something she had totally forgotten. We would both say at times “Heavens! Don’t you remember…” or “You’re right! How could I have forgotten that!”  There were also times when we would both know something had happened or that a person existed, but both of us had forgotten all about it or anything about the particular person. Sometimes our memories agreed completely, sometimes they were strikingly different: she would remember a house as red, for instance, whereas I would remember it as yellow.  It was like doing a jigsaw puzzle, where each person fills in a piece, but where there are still pieces missing, and where sometimes a piece has got in from another puzzle. It was enormously stimulating, though, and I was relieved to find that what I had remembered of that year, I had remembered correctly.

            I wonder if you have had the same experience with memory? Are there complete blanks, for no reason you can think of? Why do you think you remember the things you do? We all presumably have memories, no matter what age we are. How do you think yours works?

            By the way, although I am blogging in English, if you want to comment, you can do it in Swedish or Finnish as well, as I understand both.

I began this blog in the deepest winter. Daily I would look out at the night’s snowfall and see I had yet again to sweep the steps and dig a path to get my Husis. Where to put all the snow? The yard was getting smaller and smaller and the piles higher and higher. I would look up grimly and wonder if I should have my roof cleared yet again. It seemed as it would go on snowing forever.

Yet I end my month’s blog with the sun so dazzling into my living-room that I have to lower the blinds, with the sudden rush of snow falling off the roof and the drip, drip from my gutters growing icicles overnight. The air suddenly smells fresh and the sound of a bird singing titty-too, titty-too - the first sure sign of spring, because birds know even if we don’t – fills me with expectancy and hope.

Spring. It’s a good point to end this blog.

Blogging is strange. It’s a very private act with a very public result. I have no way of knowing it anyone reads the blog, but yet it’s out there for all the world to see if they should want. I write alone, sitting at my desk looking out onto the snow, yet I have to imagine I’m having a one-sided conversation with some stranger who might or might not become an unknown friend. What could that person possibly be interested in? I’ve no idea. The only thing to do is to write for my own pleasure and hope that the unknown person might enjoy it too. So that’s what I’ve done.

 But now my time is up.

So what am I going to do now? Oh, all the things I always intend to do but never get around to, owing to WDA. Have you heard of WDA?  It stands for Work Displacement Activity and means doing something else instead of what you ought to be doing – like cleaning the cooker when you should be answering your emails. Or of course vice versa, depending on what you least want to do of all the many things you don’t want to do.

The next urgent thing for me, though, is to finish the book I’m writing. I have already written half of it, but dropped it to write So Many Everests (being published in a week as Så Många Mount Everest), which was much more important to me.

Now I think of it, though, writing is another very private act with a (possibly) very public result. The relationship between writer and reader forms a bond, a link of some kind, and if you are lucky enough to be published, your book, too will be like communicating with a stranger who might or might not become an unknown friend.

Goodbye all. Enjoy the spring – and the summer too, when it comes.

            Fashions come and go as much in language-teaching as in clothes. For a very long time, the only method was translation. Pupils and students simply translated sentences from one language into another, either orally or in writing. Then writing something oneself was added - composition - and reading literature in the language. Nobody learnt to speak it for use in conversation. Well, nobody was really expected to need to speak it.

            Then – it seemed very suddenly – translation was OUT and conversation was IN. What’s more, early on in this language teaching revolution, it was decreed that the only language spoken in the classroom should be the one being taught. The teachers should never, ever, use the mother tongue. Of course it’s a good idea for the pupils to hear the language a lot in the classroom, but not being able to use the mother tongue at all makes teaching a nightmare, especially if the teachers don’t the language very well themselves.

            A friend of mine went out to Africa during this period. He had been told that if he had to teach a word and couldn’t find a picture of it, he should bring the object into class. He gave a vivid description of the chaos that followed the day he brought a live hen into the classroom, followed by a goat. He gave up the method.

            The friend, by the way, later became a lecturer at a University in the Middle East. He told me that his students used to bring food into the lecture hall to eat, and that if they didn’t like the lecture, they threw it at him. Since at that time I was a lecturer at Helsinki University, I was immensely grateful that I hadn’t chosen to go to the Middle East.

            Hens and goats, though, are sensible words to teach in Africa. However, common sense is not always what the authorities have. There was another decree not so very long ago – it had an important-sounding name (all methods have to have Important Names) – that English textbooks for children should have Useful Dialogues. A list of dialogues they should contain was included in the Method and all had to be covered. I remember that on the list was Booking a Hotel, In a Taxi, At a Restaurant, Lost Property, Buying Tickets, and so on. Although the authorities had obviously drawn up the list as a result of their own needs, their imagination had not extended to thinking what a child might want.

I pictured to myself a scene in London. A Finnish family arrives at a hotel. The mother discovers that she doesn’t know enough English. Little Erik, 10, pats her on the arm. “Leave this to me,” he says confidently. He turns to the receptionist: “Excuse me. Do you have a double room for two nights?  What are your rates?  Is breakfast included?...”

I struggled to protest that this was not the right English to teach at primary school, but in vain. Fortunately this Method was overtaken, as all Methods are in the end, by another, this time a more sensible and child-friendly one.

These days, textbooks try very hard to keep up with what a child might want to talk about at a particular age. Adult needs are kept for adults. Phrase books also try to keep up with adult needs too. When I was walking once in Greece with my children, we were picnicking on a mountain hillside when a Greek shepherd sat down near us to eat his bread and olive oil. We longed to speak to him. I flipped through my English-Greek phrase book and turned to the section marked “Making friends”. Unfortunately, the section began: “Would you like to come to a disco tonight?” and carried on from there.

In a comment to an earlier blog, Kristina said she thought that adults were too old to learn a language. I take it she means to learn a language perfectly, because otherwise a lot of language schools and teachers would be out of business.

I agree that a language is best learnt as a child, the earlier the better. For one thing, a small child’s vocal organs are not yet fully developed, so children are able to “get their tongues” round sounds and pronunciation which would later be much more difficult for them.  They are usually excellent mimics as well. Then, too, the younger children are, the less they are aware of rules about grammar, etc, any more than when they are learning their native language. The feeling that you have to be grammatically correct can be a great impediment to learning a language when you are adult. Children, as we all know, can just “pick up” a language when they hear others speaking it.

Another point is that young children, unless they have been indoctrinated against a particular language (and some sadly are when very young), have no prejudices against learning it. It’s just rather fun to be able to speak in another way.

So what is the best age to learn one? This is something I know quite a lot about. I’ve written a great many textbooks in my life for teaching English as a foreign language all over the world. They range from books for 4-6 year-olds to adults (my husband used to joke that I should write a book called English from the Cradle to the Grave), but most have been for 7-11 year old primary school children. In addition, until about 6 years ago, I used to give talks to teachers of foreign languages to young children in many countries, see them working in class, and have myself worked in classes with children in places as far apart as Tatarstan and Argentina, Kosovo and Nizhny Novgorod.

It seems to me that the best time to start a language is in Play School with just rhymes, songs and games. If you can’t do that, then 7 - 9 or 10 are very good ages to begin. Most children then are enthusiastic and unselfconscious, which they are certainly not when they are entering their teens. So the worst time to begin is with 13 or 14 year-olds. This is just what they’ve been doing up to now with French in English schools or, as here, with Swedish in Finnish schools. I hear that the age of teaching French in the UK is about to change – it simply hasn’t worked. No surprise there.

Motivation in learning a language is of course very important as children get older, as well as for adults.  These days probably most learners of any age are motivated to learn English, for all the obvious reasons. Teenagers definitely are too, even if it’s only to be international pop stars. The logical conclusion of all this would be to begin English at 13, when everyone would be demanding it, particularly as by then they would no doubt already know some.  However, I’m not seriously suggesting such an outrageous idea

I do seriously suggest, though, that those who decide when children learn a particular language should take into account the advantage given to one language over another by the choice of the age at which it is started. It’s not only the number of years the children will learn it (though that plays a part), but because a child starting young will have the advantages I suggested before. A language started at 13 begins from a point of disadvantage.

          And is there an age at which learning one is impossible? I don’t think so – not if a person really wants to. I don’t agree, as some people say, that someone is ever too old to learn. Not to learn the language perfectly perhaps, but to learn it adequately or even well. When I was teaching English at the University, my oldest student was 72 – and she was better than anyone else in my class.

I’m pulling your leg

“A little learning is a dangerous thing”, wrote the English poet Pope. He was certainly right about languages. If you don’t know them well – and sometimes even if you do – they are full of traps.

          I never officially learnt Swedish. I somehow picked it up right from the beginning, so that now there are not so many dangers of using the wrong word and saying something very different from what I meant.  Finnish is quite another matter. Over the years I have tried my best to pick it up but still manage to get things terribly wrong. I have particular difficulty with doubling consonants or vowels. For several years, I apparently referred to “interpreters” as “tins”, and as for the differences in the Finnish words “tule, tuli, tuuli, tulli, etc”, I just know I’ll never be able to do it.

 There is also a vivid memory of the time I was trying to explain in Finnish to some visitors that a particular room was “my favourite place”. Unfortunately, I told them it was my “love nest”. My children were helplessly but silently giggling in the doorway, while my polite Finnish visitors didn’t move a muscle of their faces.

 It’s the same with all languages. A Finnish friend of mine says that when she first visited England and was talking to some English people in a café, one of them made a joke and then, when he saw she hadn’t understood, said: “I’m pulling your leg!” My friend looked under the table in astonishment to see if he really was.

Another said that as a young woman she had met a charming man at a party. They had got on very well, and as they left, they exchanged telephone numbers. “Let’s meet again,” he said. “I’ll give you a ring”. She was horrified. They’d only just met and here he was suggesting they got engaged, ring and all! When he did ring her, she made some excuse and never saw him again. And so a promising romance died on the spot because of a language misunderstanding.

I am always amazed that we don’t hear of many worse misunderstandings when politicians speak to each other via an interpreter or when speeches are translated. Surely there must be phrases, words or idioms which are mistranslated because the interpreter doesn’t quite understand what they mean, words which cause offence or even, heaven help us, a war?

Have you made mistakes like this, or have you heard of any? I’d love to know.

Grim Gym

After reading a few blogs on other sites, I find that a lot just talk about what the writer has been doing that day. Can my day possibly be that interesting? I don’t think so for a moment, because it goes something like this.

Get up stiffly. Muscles have all weakened during night, so stagger to front door, putting on coat and gloves as I go. Open door. Blast of incredibly cold air hits me in face. See with dismay that it has snowed in night and front steps now covered. Brush steps. Brushing reveals thin layer of ice all over them. Go down very carefully, holding onto rail, and stagger further to mail-box. Mail-box has key, take off gloves to use it. Fingers instantly start hurting with cold. Go back inside as fast as icy gound will allow, clutching Husis in now frozen fingers.

Read Husis in bed over hot cup of tea. Reading in bed not good for backs. Get up even more stiffly. Put on underwear, long johns (kalsonger), vest, woollen trousers, t-shirt, sweater, socks, coat, boots, anti-slip studs on boots, hat, scarf and gloves. Make way very carefully to garage. Car makes dreadful, bronchial coughing sound. Feel great sympathy with car. Finally car agrees to start. Seat freezing, wheel freezing and cold going through all layers of clothing.

          Pick up friend and drive to gym hall. Now going to gym once a week, as slippery winters mean very little excercise. Take off most clothes listed above in reverse order and put on gym trousers, different T-shirt, other socks, and trainers. Join rest of class in gym room. Gym is Motion for the Mature. A few, like my friend and me, are very mature indeed. Try not to look at the much less mature, who are twirling round at speed, arms and steps as co-ordinated as our teacher’s. I don’t twirl. And somehow if my legs make the right movements, my arms don’t, and vice versa. Next, lie on my back and do movements demonstrated by teacher. Sit up slightly and look at others. See they are doing quite a different exercise. Turn face down on floor as instructed. Fail miserably to lift chest even one centimetre off floor with arms. Face stays on floor. And so on….

          Back to changing room, take off gym clothes and put on long johns, vest……. Together with friend (like me, she can now hardly move) to Hagalund for quick lunch. We both have problems to discuss. Oh, the wonderful luck of having a friend who will listen to one’s problems and try to help! Problems solved, more or less. Or at least, as she says: “I just wanted to hear myself think.”

          Drop friend and back home. Take off gloves, hat, scarf……

          Switch on computer to do blog, hoping afterwards to continue new book MS. Try to ignore message saying there are 17 emails waiting. Can’t ignore it. Open emails. Two hours later, all hope of continuing MS today now gone, as other tasks have to be done instead.

          Must finish blog first. There! That will have to do. Send.

          Will not describe my day again.

The King’s Speech

This is about the King’s speech, rather than about the King’s Speech: that is, it’s about the speech itself rather than the film. I did go to the film last week, though, and very good it is too. There are excellent performances not only by Colin Firth as King George VI, but by Geoffrey Rush as the therapist who helped him to control his stammer. He had to overcome it after he had unexpectedly become King and had to make a  first Christmas Speech to the Nation in 1939. Colin Firth’s acting is superb, particularly as he looks nothing like the real king did. I know. I was there.

          I was there in the sense that I actually heard King George VI make that speech on the radio. It’s rather a shock to discover I’m that ancient; it’s also amazing to find I still remember it vividly, since I was a young child at the time. What’s more, a great friend of my own age remembers it well too. It’s not only the speech – even the words – we remember but the exact feelings we had as we listened. So what made it such an emotional experience? There are two reasons, I think: one to do with the war, and one to do with the King’s speech, I mean how he spoke.

          World War II had just begun and nobody knew what lay ahead. I didn’t exactly know what war meant then, but I knew from the grown-ups that it was something terrible and to be feared. What did the King have to say? The King represented the Nation; the King represented us – how would he reassure us? How would he comfort us?  Above all, would he be able to speak at all?

          Everyone knew the King had a stammer. We’d known he had ever since he had to make a speech when he was Duke of York and couldn’t get the words out. Everyone had been hugely embarrassed, but it didn’t really matter because he could avoid speeches in the future. He would never be King, because that was his elder brother’s job. Or so we thought. Then his brother Edward VIII abdicated and the job – the one we all knew the Duke of York didn’t want – was forced upon him, so that from now on he had to make the speeches. The Christmas Speech was the most important, because in those days just about everybody listened to it on the radio ( very many people today still listen to the Queen’s Christmas Speech, too). That Christmas of 1939 it was very, very important.

          I remember the family gathered around our big bulky radio set, waiting for the King to begin. I remember the agonized suspense in which we waited. The announcer introduced him, and my fingers clenched in my hands, my eyes screwed up and my body grew stiff as the silence grew. We willed him with all our hearts to do it. It was wartime and battles were on our minds. This was a battle the King had to win. He must. Somehow in my child’s mind the speech, the King and the war were interlinked, so that it meant that if the King managed to overcome the stammer, Britain would overcome in the war.

          He did it. There were long pauses- longer than the ones he makes in the film, I seem to remember - and during those my stomach tightened again, but he managed to make the speech through to the end with only the faintest stammer here and there.  It was a fine, inspiring speech, too. His final words, which I have remembered by heart to this day, were these:

I said to the man who stood at the Gate of the Year:”Give me a light to go into the unknown.” And he said:”Put your hand into the hand of God, and that will be more than a light and safer than a known path…”

We all clapped at the end. “Wasn’t he wonderful!” we said.

          In the film, we finally come to that Speech. I listened in the cinema, waiting for those famous words: I said to the man…. They didn’t come. Why did the film leave them out, those words which we who were there remember so clearly? I shall probably never know.

Love and toothache

  Burns’ poem To A Haggis, gives you an idea of what some of his poems were like, their everyday subjects, their humour and often their satire, too. He came from a poor background and wrote about what he knew – about drunks, beggars and prostitutes, about a mouse, the toothache and even a louse.

          He wrote in  simple, ordinary language and in a simple style. The Scots, took him to their hearts at once – he was their “Rabbie” - and they love him still.

They say he wrote a lot of his best poetry when drunk – on whisky of course, the drink of the poor at that time – but it would be hard to say which he loved most,  whisky or women. He seems always to have been in love with one woman or another, so perhaps it’s no wonder that he also wrote so many great love poems and many of the most beautiful love songs in the English (Scottish) language. One of the most famous is:

“My love is like a red, red rose

That’s newly sprung in June;

My love is like the melody

That’s sweetly played in tune.

So fair art thou, my bonny lass,  (my pretty girl)

So deep in love am I;

And I will love thee still, my dear,

Till a’ the seas gang dry.            ( all….go/run)

Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,

And the rocks melt wi(th) the sun;

And I will love thee still, my dear,

Till the sands o(f) life shall run.

And fare thee weel, my only love,    (farewell)

……

A lot of his love poems were saying farewell to the girl, something in which he clearly had a lot of experience. We know he had at least 15 children, 5 by different mothers, and he seems to have written love poems to them all. I’ve no doubt he meant every word of them – at the time.

The Gay Gordons

We had a love song on Burns Night, of course, during which we all became misty-eyed. Then the mood changed as they started the Céilidh Dancing – Scottish country dancing and still very popular. We began with The Gay Gordons (not a homosexual pop-group, as one might think these days, but a famous easy dance), so that the non-Scots could learn a few steps. I knew how to dance it, but by then I’d decided it was time to go home if there was to be any chance of making it in the still-falling wet snow.

Into the arms of the police

          I drove out into the street and turned left. In front of me the lights of a stationary police van was on the right only a few yards away, as security has of course to be very tight near embassies these days. I drove literally into the arms of the law. At least, as I drove round to pass the van, its door opened and a very large young policeman, completely stony-faced, stepped out into my path, arms outstretched. Too late, I knew what I’d done.

          “I’m so sorry”, I stammered. “I forgot this was a one-way street!”

 I was of course going the wrong way up it.

          “Yes,” he said. “It’s a one-way street.”

          Behind me, the stamps, whoops and cries of the Scottish dancers could clearly be heard.

          “Oh dear,” I said. “Can I please turn round here?”  I gestured widely to the entrance to the French Embassy.

          He looked at me.

 “Yes,” he said at last, still stony-faced, “but do it quickly.”

          I did a fast and hopefully elegant three-point turn, anxious to prove I was neither drunk nor senile, and drove back the way I had come.

          I have never been so glad to have refused a whisky with my haggis.

Note: I was wrong about Burns’ birthday. It was on January 25^th, so we were a bit late in our celebrations

The Food of Poets

Runeberg was born on February 5^th, the Scottish national poet Robert Burns on February 4^th. They are both celebrated on those days by their countries – Runeberg has a Day, Burns a Night. The celebrations are as different as the men, their lives and their poetry.

 Burns, in fact, has a Burns Night Supper.  I’ve heard about those, I’ve read about them, and now I’ve actually been to one. Friday found me driving to the British Embassy, which was hosting a Burns Night Supper in aid of a Children’s Charity in Helsinki.

          A piper, dressed in a kilt and all the other Scottish bits and pieces, piped us all in as we arrived.  She – yes, it was a woman - was a Finn from the Helsinki Pipes and Drums. I wonder if you knew there was such a thing? I certainly didn’t. Inside, the drawing-room was bright with Scottish kilts, tartan skirts, and tartan sashes. There were also several there unkilted and untartaned : Finns or people from other countries, like me from Wales/England.

 When we all sat down to dinner, I opened the programme on the table in front of me and read with amazement its four pages, thick with events. There were a lot of toasts on it: to the Queen, to the President of Finland, to the various heads of States of those present, to the Immortal Memory (presumably of Burns), to the Lassies (girls), Reply on Behalf of the Lassies, etc. I noticed there was not only a bottle of red wine and one of white on each table but half a bottle of Scotch whisky as well. We were obviously going to need it.

          There were some other more mysterious things listed: the Selkirk Grace, Piping in the Haggis, Address to the Haggis, Holy Willy’s Prayer, Céilidh Dancing, and so on.  Somewhere in there was a menu, too, but the food seemed a minor event besides all these things.

 Except for the haggis. The haggis was the Star of the whole celebration.

Runeberg’s food is a dainty little brown barrel of a cake, decorated prettily with pink or white icing and red raspberry jam.  Burns’ food  is a swollen, oval balloon, its tight skin –  a sheep’s stomach - the pale yellowy-grey of dirty sock water; inside it is an almost black, grainy mess. The recipe for Runeberg tarts contains almonds, butter, brown sugar, fine flour and cream; the recipe for haggis contains a sheep’s heart, liver and lungs, and oatmeal. It looks and sounds disgusting. Whisky is drunk with it (that’s why it was on each table), which you might think was to drown the taste, but is actually to enhance it. Because haggis is delicious – especially if you forget what it’s in it.

          So, after a lot of toasts, witty speeches and jokes, very funny and well-told, and often at the expense of the “Sassenachs” ( the Scots’ derogatory word for their traditional enemies the English), we came to the Haggis.

The Entry of the Haggis

          Now, a Haggis makes an Entry, just like a diva on a stage. Instead of the rolling of drums to mark it, the bagpipes pipe it in (is there a tune called the Haggis March, I wonder?). That is, the piper leads the way in full dress; behind the piper comes the Haggis, carried with reverence by the one who cooked it, in this case the Finnish chef. He bore it on a tray in all its shiny, grey glory, stuffed to bursting point. The Haggis was alone on its plate, by it on the tray was its escort of four glasses of whisky and a Scottish “dirk” (dagger). We all applauded. The Haggis with chef stood aside in the doorway as a man stepped forward. He had the honour of reciting the Address to the Haggis, a poem in its praise written, of course, by Robert (Rabbie) Burns.

          Suddenly a stream of almost incomprehensible language burst from his lips. Could he be speaking English? Well, yes and no. He was speaking Scottish English, which is not only full of Scottish words but has its own regional accents. This man spoke with one of the broadest accents I’ve ever heard, and I understood about three or four words in ten. He had an interpreter.

          However, the fact that he could hardly be understood - perhaps even by some of the Scots present - did not matter, because he was an excellent actor. His words were full of passion, now gesturing to the Haggis with obvious praise for such a glorious dish, now dismissing all other foods with contempt (I caught “French ragouts” somewhere in there).

          He picked up the dirk on the tray.

          Suddenly, with a wild gesture, he stabbed its centre. The tight skin split open and spilled its dark entrails onto the plate. It was like disembowelling the enemy. Symbolically it probably was, the enemy in point no doubt being a sassenach. We all cheered wildly.

          An image I shall long remember is the expression of polite amazement on the Finnish chef’s face as his beautifully cooked Haggis was murdered.

(More on Burns Night, Burns and Scottish English to come…)

Languages by the Nature Method

 Last Sunday I went to a friend’s 75^th birthday party. It was basically a family party with two or three close friends as well. By now the family has grown and is expanding, with three generations and ages ranging from 5 upwards. At such parties the children and grown-ups are often put at separate tables, but on this occasion we were all mixed up – a delightful experience which I wish happened more often, so that old and young could get to know each other better.

I was next to one of the granddaughters, now 17 and gearing up to take her Matriculation Exam next year.  We agreed to speak in English, a language in which she was fluent. She was already nervous about the exam and explained that she was particularly worried about her Finnish, which she thought she didn’t know well enough, especially not when she had to write it. She had grown up and gone to school in a mostly Swedish-speaking environment and had not had to speak Finnish much. Girls seem to have more problems with this than  boys, as Swedish-speaking  boys– in the areas in and around Helsinki at least – seem often to speak Finnish together when outside school.

 At any rate, we were chatting about what she might do about her Finnish. She said she had stayed in a Finnish-speaking family for a week – far too short a time, I said, to improve it much. It was then that English by the Nature Method  flashed into my mind.

Some of you may even be old enough to remember this. It was one of the first commercial language courses to be introduced into Finland. You might call it “a media course”, since it was a book which came with speech recordings by native speakers – on  vinyl. I can’t remember what Nature had to do with it, and suspect that the word “natural” was the one intended, as you listened to real British people speaking “naturally” (though not very). Anyway, in those days we young things jokingly used “the Nature Method” to describe a rather different way of learning a language.

I recalled the rapid improvement to my French which happened when, long ago, I had a boyfriend in France; the same to my Swedish during the year I worked in Åbo; later, a much slighter improvement to my German when I went out with a German for a very short time. My shamefully poor Finnish is probably because I never had a Finnish-speaking boyfriend, only – though “only” isn’t the word – a British husband. Though my English improved after that too, because he had a wonderfully witty way with words.

So I now turned to my table companion and said: “You know the easiest, quickest and most pleasant way of learning Finnish would be to have a Finnish-speaking boyfriend”. Looking at her, I didn’t think this would be too difficult to achieve.

 Mind you, I don’t think she’s the kind of person to take up with a boyfriend merely because he might help her with her Finnish, any more than I did, so there will probably have to be another solution.

Still, for quick results, there’s nothing like learning a language by the good old “nature method”.

P.S. Do you have any good ideas for my friend’s granddaughter on how to improve her Finnish, especially her written Finnish?

                             -----------------------------------

Returning to Albanian moustaches, Irene’s comment asks whether there are any words in the book I’m reading which express pleasant ideas. Good question. When I come to think of it, no, not many. I don’t know what that says about society (or perhaps the book). Here are four:

wo-umba (Bakweri, Cameroon): the smiling in sleep by children

omirighligh (Khakas, Siberia): a person with a beautiful bearing, like a horse with as strong chest

koi no yokan (Japanese): a sense on meeting that something is going to develop into love (a phrase subtly different to our ”love at first sight”)

alamnaka (Ulwa, Nicaragua): to meet a kindred soul

 I was lamenting the lack of words or phrases which would be useful to have in Swedish or English. However, I have discovered that some languages do have the very ones I want.

             I bought a book for Christmas called I Never Knew There Was a Word for It, by Adam Jacot de Boinod, published by Penguin. This has given me, and is still giving me, great joy, and I’m going through it at about three pages a night. It does what is said on the tin, as the current phrase goes: there usually is a word for it, if not in any language you may ever meet. I’ve checked the explanations for some of those I know, and they seem mostly right, even if the author has not been able to express one or two exactly in English even now.

 How about some of these:

ataoso (Central American Spanish): one who sees problems with everything

kibitzer (Yiddish): one who interferes with unwanted advice

nedovtipa (Czech): one who finds it hard to take a hint

neko-neko (Indonesian): one who has a creative idea which only makes things worse

kopuhia (Rapa Nui, Easter Island): someone who disappears instead of dedicating himself to his work

nudnyi (Russian): someone who, when asked how they are, tells you in detail

chovochovo (Luvale, Zambia) : the tendency to carry on talking when others have stopped.

You must have come across all or most of these people. You might even be one of them yourself – I fear I may be a chovochovo, for instance. My favourite is neko-neko ,which I think I will adopt . It would have come in handy on many occasions in my life – a couple of them for use about one or two of the “reforms” Helsinki University went through during my time there, when there were neko-nekos  on a grand scale. It might be useful politically too, as there are rather too many neko-nekos in local, governmental and EU matters. I’m sure you can think of some.

   The book also makes me have a fellow-feeling with many cultures, illustrating as it does that people are alike wherever they are may be or whatever language they speak.

    And what about those Albanian moustaches? Well, the book tells me that Albanians have no fewer than ten words to describe the types of moustache, not counting the one for simply “a moustache”. There’s even one, rruar, for a moustache that has been shaved off. Words tell you about culture, too. I’ve never been to Albania (though I’ve met Albanians in Kosovo just before the fighting there). I see it now in my imagination as a place thickly forested with moustaches.

 P.S. Do you have any suggestions for something we need a word for in Swedish? Or for the word itself?

It seems it’s my turn to write a blog.  It’s going to be in English, though, as otherwise I will be wondering all the time if my Swedish is correct and it will take me forever to do. I know so many of you know English well, anyway, and, if you don’t, you can practise on this perhaps. But please feel free to make any comment in either language.

In fact, language and its relation to another language is what’s on my mind at the moment. I’m not – or not at the moment – going to join the current discussion about languages in schools, though I’m interested in that, too. Today, it’s how different languages use different words to express things that’s occupying my thoughts.

This is because my daughter Victoria and I have just been going through the translation of our book So Many Everests,  due to be published in March under the title Så Många Mount Everest.  There’s a translation question right there in the title of course: can you use the plural in Swedish as I have done in the original English? Could you leave out ‘mount’? We discussed it quite a lot at Söderströms. What do you think?

  Don’t worry, I’m not going to go into the text in detail or into translation problems in general – I’ll leave that to the experts – but just to raise some questions of expressing nuances, getting just the right phrase, conveying exactly what is meant.

You can’t say that in….

A lot of you will be using two languages daily, Swedish and Finnish. Perhaps three, especially if you are on the internet. Many of you may be so used to turning from Swedish to Finnish or vice versa throughout your lives that you don’t think about how differently you may use words to express the same thing – you may just do it naturally. Others will be scratching their heads, saying “How do I say that in…?” or “Can one say it like that in…?”

          We’ve been puzzling over this with the translator of our book, Janina Jansson from Radioteatern, who has done a wonderful job. In the past I have frequently translated radio plays for her into English, so now we have changed places. It’s a fascinating experience for both us. She remarked the other day that now she understood the position of those translators who would say to her “But you can’t say that in English!” and when she asked “Why not?” would answer: “You just can’t.” Of course she has now found herself saying to me about translating an English word or phrase into Swedish: “You just can’t say it like that.”

          How much one longs to be able to use the same expression! How easy it would make life!  If it comes to that, how wonderful it would be if you had just one word or phrase in your own language for some things, people or behaviour! How about a word, for instance, for that annoying person who sees problems with everything you suggest? In fact, a word does exist for just that, though not, alas, in either Swedish or English.

I’ll tell you more in my next blog, Albanian moustaches.

Diana Webster Feb.1st, 2011