(not so) novel ideas

It was with a mixture of relief and regret that I realised I was writing the wrong book.

Reading back over my blog entries from earlier this year, that seems glaringly obvious; but I guess (almost) everything is obvious with hindsight.

The novel was set in London and had a strongly autobiographical theme all dressed up in a vaguely Gabriel Garcia Marquez worldscape. And it went nowhere. Until one day, I found myself walking the streets of Kruununhaka; streets that I must have walked down numerous times before but had obviously never really seen. My hometown was a surprise to me. I goggled like a tourist.

Push and pull. This isn’t a novel of arrival, it’s a novel of departure. I shouldn’t be examining London, it’s Helsinki that needs to go under the microscope – or the autopsy knife. Which yet remains to be seen.

And so here I am, starting (almost) from square one. A new outline is taking shape. As so many have done before.

‘There are no new ideas,’ said Audre Lorde. ‘Only new ways of making them felt.’

I seem to have been seeking that special something all my life. And now I fear the moment when my outline is complete. In fact, the moment when anything I produce is ‘done’. For it’s always the moment when I, once again, realise that that spark is missing.

And it will be back to (almost) square one. But I am tiring of a life that always requires the insertion of (almost).

Niche Market

It’s been six months since I mouthed off about grand plans and, what a surprise, all I have is half a page of scribbled lines. Quite literally. That is all there is of the novel that, according to my writing schedule, should have reached sixty eight thousand words today.

Neither my personal life nor my projects have quite gone to plan. My purposefully empty calendar did not result in productivity and relaxation, but lethargy and depression. Somehow I seemed to achieve more in those snatched moments.

Last week I had one of those five a.m. epiphanies re my novel’s abortive start: I realised I was writing the wrong book. More details forthcoming in a subsequent post; for now, I’ll stick to the real-life implications.

This country! It’s the miserable weather, the prejudice I face by being a minority, and the language barrier – that’s the problem. Language, especially in my chosen fields of writing and the performing arts, is what’s holding me back. Whatever I do, because it’s in English, will only ever have a limited audience and restricted success in Finland. I’d have done so much better had I stayed in England.

Or would I? Yes, there’s a limited audience for my work here, but at the same time there’s also a limited artist base. I’ve enjoyed a cosy niche market; let’s even call it a healthy lack of competition. My special minority status may even have opened up opportunities I never would have had ‘at home’, even on the am dram circuit.

Now, as I contemplate my return to London, I find myself faced with a disturbing question: what if my audience there turns out to be just as limited? Am dram panto at the church hall. Will I discover that once I can no longer blame ‘This country!’, I will have to face up to my own mediocrity?

Thought I’d Something More to Say

Like many people, I discovered Pink Floyd in my teens. Floyd songs featured heavily on the tapes I used to play in my car when driving to uni, and Time was always one of my favourites.

And then one day you find, ten years have got behind you – genius lyrics, I always thought. Until one day you listen to that song and it’s true, and those genius lyrics become acute in all the wrong ways.

This song rolled around on shuffle recently, and those oh-so-familiar lyrics that I had happily sung along to so many times, nodding sagaciously at their profundity, suddenly became a bullet of ice in my chest: I have achieved no more than that half a page of scribbled lines in the oh-my-god-fifteen years since I first heard those lyrics.

I’ve always eschewed five-year plans and the such like, because the randomness of the world has always made them seem irrelevant; but in a Floydian epiphanic moment, I’ve realised that it is the randomness of I that has always made them irrelevant.

I am not one for New Year’s resolutions, and I won’t be dressing up my decisions in such gimcrack threads; but the end-of-year period does often become a time of solitary reflection and realisation, and – whether it roughly coincides with the New Year or not – I will be embarking on a one-year plan. This is goodbye to the English way.

Because I do really think I’ve something more to say.

A Sense of Place

I’ve always been mildly puzzled when listening to people with a strong sense of belonging to a certain place, as I’ve never really experienced that magnetism; never felt an internal compass spin to any particular point.

The closest I came to feeling that gently quivering needle was during the early years after we left London. I was coming on ten when we moved, and for some reason – difficult age, difficult times or difficult psyche? – I never made the transition properly. I elevated London into a Promised Land: if only I could return, everything would be all right.

But when, a few years later, I did return for a short visit, London was… just another place. Drinking London tap water did not grant eternal life or happiness. I resigned myself to life in the North, realising that place did not matter: wherever I went, that miserable I was always tagging along.

That epiphany didn’t make me into a global hobo – wherever I lay my suitcase isn’t home – but maybe it made it a lot easier to emigrate. I’ve lived in Finland for nigh on eleven years now, and never in that time have I felt the urge to go back to England. As I celebrated my ten years in Finland earlier this spring, I was firmly convinced that I’d still be here in another ten, twenty, thirty years.

Until last week.

Why now? And why so suddenly – a change like bad weather rolling across sunlit fields? And although Finland must have plenty of cows, in my accompanying mental image, those imaginary clouds just swept over English fields of black and white dairy cows. In the same way that my dreamscape was long based on lost childhood landscapes, have these Friesians been lowing, sotto voce, in the dusty recesses of my mind this past decade?

The pivot on which the mood turned seems so silly, so trivial, so completely incapable of being responsible for such a profound anything. I was trying to arrange a day out with a friend. What would I most like to do, she asked. Go to the theatre, was my initial thought. But everything was in Finnish, and her language skills weren’t up to it. I could have managed, but – goddamnit! – I don’t want to see theatre in Finnish, I thought. And then, remembering the way I was struggling to choose what to do during my trip to England in the spring – not because there wasn’t anything interesting going on, but because there was just so much theatre and stand-up and history and exhibitions and what have you – suddenly I just wanted to go somewhere where I could truly love and appreciate the world around me.

Is this feeling simply a fleeting by-product of the dark days of Finnish kaamos, or because I’d hoped to be in England over Christmas but couldn’t be, or am I just raising my sunken Atlantis, that place I know is just a place, because I am otherwise unhappy? Or is the sly sense of place stronger than I thought?

I have spent this Christmas Day, not playing chess with the cats as threatened (they cheat and try to eat the prawns), but pondering this conundrum; and whilst I’ve not experienced an epiphany as such, I have just realised one very worrying aspect of my life here: of all my good friends, very, very few of them are Finns. Yup - you know where they're mostly from.

Long-dead Roses

I may be about to lose Zephalonius, one of my favourite ancestors.

Sometimes the tortuous trail of parish register deductions takes a wrong turn and it’s not until you emerge from the trees that you realise you’ve hacked through the wrong forest.

Whatever happens, Zeph will probably remain somewhere in the extended family, but he may no longer be ‘mine’. I’m surprised at quite how disappointed I feel – and how I have become attached to these centuries-dead people.

I’m not equally attached to all the ancestors I have – metaphorically – unearthed. Some I get attached to because I feel that I’m getting to know them. These are usually the ones who’ve left more of a paper trail than simply their baptism, marriage and burial entries.

In the 1841 census, one lady was down as living – presumably ‘in sin’ – with some foreign-sounding chap and was imprisoned for seven days for withholding information. With a strong base in Hempstead and its environs, I’m also collecting members of the infamous Essex Gang. But it’s amazing how much difference it makes simply knowing an ancestor’s occupation.

Zephalonius was a contemporary of William Shakespeare, coiner of those oft-quoted lines: ‘What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.’ But do I instantly ‘like’ certain ancestors more simply because they have distinctive names?

I have also come across a couple of rather unfortunate names during the course of my research.

I was unable to discover the forename of an ancestor’s sister’s husband. It was unfortunate that I had to note her down as marrying an ‘Unknown Pratt’.

Another gentleman’s wife – unfortunately not in my direct line – was born Fanny Cock. I like to imagine this prim Victorian lady introducing herself as she takes afternoon tea in the drawing room.

In the very next year, a neighbouring village spawned Goliath Cocks. The accompanying census capture is from when he was, ahem, ‘head’ of the household.

I now have a burning desire to write a story in which Goliath Julius Cocks – Victorian gentleman hero – takes the starring role…

Bring back þorn!

No, not porn – þat is alive and well – I mean the letter þorn.

Þorn was part of þe Old English alphabet and, unlike in Icelandic, could represent eiþer of our modern th sounds. Alþough two ‘special’ characters – eth and wynn – died out relatively quickly, þorn and long s survived: long s until Victorian times and þorn into þe Middle English period; even þough its use was þen largely restricted to short þ words and standard abbreviations.

All þose ‘Ye Olde Teashoppes’ are in fact using a late form of þorn, which became almost indistinguishable from y, alþough it was still pronounced þ.

Why bring back þorn?

First and foremost, þorn is just plain cool.

Most oþer European languages are livened up by a sprinkling of ticks, hats and swooshes. English has noþing. But we don’t need to be a plain jane – we can have þorn.

Þorn is also environmentally friendly.

Th is a common combination in þe English language, as it is used in so many common words, such as þe, þis, þat, þem and þen . Using t plus h takes up twice þe space of using þ.

A quick analysis of some English texts shows þat an average of 3–4 per cent of þe characters (including white spaces) are taken up by t and h in þe combination th.

Analysis of a random novel shows þat 3.9 per cent of its characters form part of a th combination. Replace þese wiþ þorn and þe total number of characters will be reduced by 2 per cent. In a 340-page novel, þis equates to a saving of about seven whole pages.

Þink of þe number of books published in þe English language every year and you will see þat þorn is the tree messiah.

I þink þat þis discovery now obligates me to run for parliament – or at least appear on Late Night Wiþ Conan O’Brien.

Kaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhn!

Another shameless self promotion – sorry, viral marketing – post is on the cards; but in order not to make it three in a row, I decided to squeeze a little bit of fluff in between.

In her grand return to blogging, Fionna said she was not going to fill up her blog with meme results. But it’s true: as soon as you see one, you want to do it! I stumbled across one and, yes, I did it. Drat.

And another sad reality is, as soon as you’ve got your meme result, you feel the overwhelming urge to share it. Or should that be ‘spread it like an itchy plague’? Heh, heh, resist if you can, but I expect to see your meme results posted soon!

Oh yes, but down to business: if I were a fantasy or sci-fi character, I’d be … Captain James T. Kirk!

An impassioned commander with more respect for individuals than for authority, you have a no-holds-barred approach to life and its obstacles.

"I don’t believe in the no-win scenario."

Yes, well. If only I could get my 'crew' to stop farting in rehearsals.

I also note that on Facebook’s compare people application, I was once voted a better singer than someone else. I can only imagine that person was my almost alter ego William Shatner.