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.
