verganheitsbewältigung

I’m not sure when it happened. Sometime during this past decade.

Do you remember when you last went to a wedding or function or any type of show or event and there wasn’t a rabid herd of cameras snapping and flashing every ten seconds? As a friend of mine recently noted, the snap-happy mentality even reigns at funerals these days.

Once upon a time, the past could be lost in the mists of time. You could remember shit the way you wanted to. Every time you told the story of what happened, it would alter slightly: some parts embellished, some downplayed, until you reached a reconstructed version of history that you could live with.

Now there are photos – and even worse, videos – to blow those mists away. No matter how much you rationalise, philosophise and comfort yourself with a few healthy delusions, the truth will always exist on YouTube.

Much as I would like to know who really wrote Shakespeare, who really assassinated Kennedy and who wrote my telephone number in that public toilet in Blackpool, I hope we never invent time travel. History is a dish better served braised.

As you may have guessed, tonight’s gig could have gone better and I’m hoping none of those filming their sets caught the mc by accident.

Ah well, maybe I’ll tell this story of telling stories a few times and see whether it takes me closer to, or farther away from, the truth.

And the New Year blows in, casting away the spent leaves of summer

Today was summer’s dying breath. One last stand before autumn sets in for good. Goodbye to sun and all that.

The New Year used to start with the spring awakening on March twenty-fifth, and now it begins pedantically on January first, separating two indistinguishable days of midwinter. But for me, it has always been the arrival of autumn that has heralded the New Year. No doubt this is largely a relic of the new school year starting on September first in England, combined with the way Finland seems to revive from its two-month aestivation. Autumn has always been the time to embark on new things.

My birthday also sits on the cusp of autumn. The change of season marks a personal new year, too. This year, I was to throw a joint birthday/leaving party. I've spent the past twelve months counting lasts: this is my last Winter, this is my last Vappu, this is my last Juhannus, because I’ll be gone by October. This New Year was to be the start of a new era.

Yet now I have to face my looming birthday in the knowledge that I am to remain here indefinitely, in the same miserable situation, and that this New Year’s Day will fall between two indistinguishable days of autumn drizzle.

I am trying to make the best of it. I’m taking on projects to stave off the feelings of failure, of treading water, of disappointment in myself; even though I have little hope of them amounting to anything. A friend surprised me the other day by saying that I make a habit of exceeding myself in everything I do. I would say that I've underperformed at everything I’ve attempted. If I’m such an overachiever, how come I’m still ‘here’, both physically and metaphorically?

In fact, that sense of failure is currently so overwhelming that I’m finding good news hard to take. Other people’s, that is. My friends are landing great new jobs abroad, getting married, being offered amazing artistic opportunities, gaining PhDs… the list goes on and they’re all younger than me. And while I’m happy for them, because they’re my friends and they deserve their success, each of their triumphs is another poke in the eye that reminds me of my failure.

One wet and gloomy autumn night years ago, I got on the wrong bus. I was tired, the windows were steamed up, and I didn’t realise until it was too late. Until the bus reached the terminus and I was disgorged into some godforsaken hole in the suburbs of Vantaa. Late night, no way of knowing how or when or if I’d ever get home.

That’s how I feel right now.

kill your babies, pets and mouth bacteria, hoover up your dust bunnies and trample your rose beds, hell grab a bazooka and blast the lot away

You may already have inferred that this is not going to be a happy post.

When asked if the glass is half-empty or half-full, I often like to call myself a ‘magical realist’ and a ‘laissez-faire optimist’. But today I have been facing my nemesis: capital-r reality sans flippancy. (But still with poncey French loan words.)

Much as I hate to admit defeat, I know that I’m going to have to accept defeat as the right decision. Yes, yet another of my projects is going up in flames. But I hope to find some phoenix eggs hatching from the ashes. Maybe these chicks will grow up to be greater than their parent? Who knows – all I can do is nurture them and find out.

Never give up, but know when to adapt.

(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.