a finnish woman’s diary

I never believed in Santa. All my Christmas presents came from somebody I knew, never Santa. My mum was a seventies mum – she did not believe in lying to kids. So she never bothered to pretend. Except once, when I was six, she said Santa had dropped the presents behind the door, while we weren’t in. But then the presents were the same ones I’d seen hidden in the cupboard earlier, and again, they were all accounted for: one from mummu, one from auntie Maija, one from my mum. So that was that.

I also never believed in God.

I wonder if these things are related, since I’ve caught my daughter praying a few times. Once, I am quite certain, she was praying for magic powers, but the next time I heard her distinctly saying: “Please God, give me Teksta the Robotic Puppy.”

The poor girl’s got her Santy and God-All-Mighty mixed up.
But on the other hand, she is right; it would be a miracle if Santa brought her that.

Not a chance, love, not a chance.

I popped into Trinity College last week; the sight of all these kids hanging out with all the time in the world made me a bit jealous I must admit. It also brought me back to my own college years. Funny how I had so much time back then. Even though I was working extremely hard on my studies, even though I had a part time job, even though I was extremely active in several organisations, even though I had a young child, there was still always time to hang out in Alakuppila, the café, for hours on end. And I graduated fast in Finnish terms, with excellent grades. I always had time for everything I wanted to do, never felt I didn’t have enough time for my daughter. How on earth did I manage all that?

I’ve been reading Kate Thompson’s The New Policeman with my daughter, and I am beginning to think that somebody is stealing my time. (An excellent book aimed at pre-teens I guess, but it’s also a nice intro to Irish mythology for anybody not too familiar with it)

I get to leave work most days at 5.30pm, early in Irish terms; it takes me twenty minutes to get home, which again is nothing in a city were people hours on their daily commute to and from work. Still by the time dinner and dishes and homework are dealt with, there’s hardly any time at all to do anything together before bedtime.

Weekends go by in a flash, of holidays we get only 20 days a year.

I don’t know how everybody copes with this year in year out. Surely I am not the only working parent in this country? Surely even non-parents have life outside the office?

My own blog tells me that my own comments are spam. How dare it.

“There are two kinds of people…”

There we have it.

All of us westerns think we have the right to go wherever we please and see if we can make it and live our lives there, should we so choose, whether is Ireland, Australia, China, India or Brazil. Yet, if somebody wants to do the same the other way round; an Indian, Afghani, Palestinian or somebody Chinese wants to come and see what he can make of life here, it is suddenly not ok. Unless they have some kind of commercial value to us. But my God, if they happen to be unlucky enough to be refugees, then they have negative commercial value.

Because there are two kinds of people
There are me and mine, the ones I will fight for, and then there’s the rest, the ones that can go and die and starve and get exploited but I won’t really care. Oh I will show a bit of charity here and there, if only to get kicks out of how good and morally superior I am. I might even let some of them come over here, if I can exploit their labour force, but should their commodity value not be needed anymore, I will be free to get rid of them again.

This thinking is wrong and appalling.

You cannot reduce human beings to commodities.
You don’t do it to yourself, (unless you plan to commit suicide the moment the net worth of what you have produced outweighs the cost of your keep) so don’t do it to others.

Pekka warns Maria in the comments of her blog not to read my views of history because they are “wrong”. It is true they are not what Pekka’s high school teacher told him about our wars with Russia. And what Pekka’s high school teachers had been told to tell him about our wars. Touching that Pekka should worry about Maria not being able to judge for herself. Of course she is a foreigner and a woman, how could she be trusted to think for herself.

Finns get really upset if anybody hints at the possibly that we allied with Germans, and by allying with them, helped them. We did. That is the whole point of allegiances.
We did worse things than that. e.g.
And maybe it’s time to own up to the fact that our past is not as spotlessly clean and innocent and heroic as we would like to believe it to be.

Wars are ways of creating divisions between Us and Them, ways of Othering. Racism is Othering too. Nationalism can’t really exist without an Other to define it.

It’s funny nobody ever tells me to go back where I came from and stop expecting the Irish state to provide for me, nobody seems to ever even think it.

I guess I am white, well educated, not of an offending religion, but I could so easily be an Other, too. If Stalin had given his army some proper skis in the winter of 1939, and had sent all of us Finns back to where we came from, I would now not be part of the Us, but of the Others. I would have to register, get work permits and re-entry visas every time I went off to see my mother; technically also every time I went up to Belfast to visit old friends.

And they spot check busses and trains to and from Belfast these days. It’s the freakiest thing; the bus stops, people in uniforms come on, looking for ID’s and take some of the non-Irish looking people off and the bus goes on without them.
That could be me. But it isn’t.
I am not an Other, thus not a Terrorist; not this war, anyway.

It is a big day today.
No, not because of the Finnish Independence Day. No.

Finland “won” its independence because Lenin had said we could be independent if the Revolution was successful. And he kept his word. So we became an independent nation because the Russians couldn’t really be bothered about us anymore.

And upon independence we promptly had a bloody civil war.The whites won. The nation was deeply divided, the civil war wounds deep, the whites tried to wipe out red legacy. 27,000 reds killed according to the stats, most of them at post war prison camps, where starving of prisoners seems to have been a matter of policy. My great granddad ended up on one of these camps when he was in his twenties, a young father of two children. He never fought, but had been active in the trade union at the shoe factory he worked in. He survived, but lost all his hair and teeth. My great grandmother divorced him out of shame.

You can’t really discuss Finnishness without bringing in the World War II era. There’s that wonderful Winter War, which we, erm, lost. In 3.5 months. But at least be beat the Russians, a bit. Which was a great, because erm, it helped the Nazis? (And then there’s the Continuation War where we –very smartly -did it again. And again for that great cause, Lebensraum for the Germans. The Continuity War opened a second front against the Soviet Union, enabling the Nazis to penetrate as far as Stalingrad.) But there’s nothing like fighting a common enemy to bring a nation together, the unified Social Democrat nation of Finland was undoubtedly born out of the Spirit of the Winter War.

In honour of this proud tradition I would like to point you to two Finnish blogs: one written by a dark-skinned foreigner in Finland ; and another one which I am not going to directly link to, written in that true spirit of the Winter War: a racist. (Both links in Finnish)

It’s like winning the lottery to be born in Finland, and if you ain’t born in Finland to Finnish parents, well, get the fuck out. But don’t forget to visit Santa Park first. 20 euros a pop, and you get a wonderful certificate, for free. Actually, they probably charge for the certificate.

No I am not celebrating that today.
I am celebrating 10 years of life with a lovely Irish guy. It’s been good. I love you.

Edit: For non-Finnish speakers, Maria points out in the comment below, that she isn’t very dark, she is Spanish. This makes reading her blog even more disturbing.

An Interesting Weekend.

First up was the annual Company Christmas party. They are a bit ostentatious here, and each year they need to out-do last year’s do, and this time I had no excuse handy to avoid it. So it was five star Nouveau French Cuisine: an eight course meal that left you hungry.

On the positive side, certain people in the office who needed taking down a peg or two did so, all by themselves. Imagine waking up the next morning to the realization that you tried to get off with a co-worker who is not only 15 years your junior but also gay. And that you did that at a stage, before dessert, when most people were still sober, and NOTICED. Priceless.

The next night was a trad gig. I was a bit wary about attending this one, as it was a bit unclear who exactly the organiser was - republican certainly, but just how republican? But the line-up was promising and sure, if I did end up attending a support bash for an illegal organisation by mistake and got the special branch after me, it wasn’t like they’d have anything to find. The poor sods might get all exited hearing me discuss laundering chains, branching out and my experiences with my new piracy project. But sooner or later it would have to dawn on them that the height of my activism entails this:

But it turned out to be Sinn Fein, so the special branch shan’t be bothered about my knitting habits. Alas.

And boy, the craic was mighty: one superb act after another: Karan Casey followed by Rónán from Kila followed by Frances Black. If you ever get a chance to see Kila, don’t miss it! Nobody should die before they’ve had a chance to see them perform.

But, now to go and pointendly NOT mention the Christmas Party at a certain senior staff member..

I did in the end write a complaint to Dublin Bus.
The reply came quickly enough; unfortunately it was nothing more than a verbal shrug. A cut-and-paste job of different excuses; they hadn’t even bothered to make sure the font was the same throughout the reply. The main excuse was “oh yeah there was a traffic jam earlier that day.” There is always a traffic jam! Have a plan B!

On my first day of my first job in Dublin I was late, even though I arrived at the right bus stop at 8.05am, and this bus was supposed to run every ten minutes. At 8.50 I managed to wave down a taxi that got me there only 15 minutes late – unforgivable on a first day in Scandinavia, but most of the other staff hadn’t even showed up yet, so I wouldn’t have needed to worry. But I didn’t know that then.

Anyway I am obviously wasting my breath. But it is sometimes tough being a carless Dubliner so bear with me. I guess I should just stick to my bike.

But good news too, I managed to find a present for my stepfather!

This guy is a tough number to get presents for under ordinary circumstances, what with him having no interests as far anybody can tell, but now, officially dying, it’s a mission impossible. What to get a man with no future? Last year I got him a woolly jumper which was “too small and the wrong colour” as I was promptly informed by the recipient, so I ain’t going there again. And chocolates and whisky are banned for health reasons.

After some pondering I decided on a book. He has never read anything much, but maybe now, being largely bedridden, is a good time to start? But how to get a book in Dutch in Dublin for a Dutchman residing in Finland in time for the Christmas posting deadline, already looming close? And a suitable book too? Another tough mission. Using eBay was going to cut it fine, very fine, too fine. I would be disowned if my presents did not arrive in good time before Christmas. It would be a sign of me Not Caring Enough if I left it to last minute.

(Don’t get me wrong, I like my family. But they are a little set in their ways. And pretty direct about things : -) )

So on the book hunt I went and was soon directed to International Books and - tadaa - they had one piece of fiction in stock in Dutch – The Da Vinci Code. A Big Shiny Copy. Perfect. I was much delighted, and so were they. I wonder if they had a bet on or something for cheers of “hey we sold the Dutch Book!” could be heard as I exited the store with their first and only copy of a piece of fiction in Dutch in my clutch.

Mission Accomplished.

And now to get something for my mother…

It’s a two-for-the-price-of-one day.
For I had other things to say, too. I don’t live in a slum anymore, I am happy. I no longer have rats in my attic, kids on my walls, eggs on my windows.
I think Dublin is just great.

I love the windy little Dublin streets, that nobody has ever managed to impose town planning on, I love the way the big roads have to make a stupid bend, because somebody refuses to sell their collapsed ruin of a property.

I love the performers on Grafton Street. Yesterday it was a Canadian juggling a pitchfork and a baseball bat above a man’s face. Throwing the bat high up in the air, catching it within an inch of the man’s nose. And the puppeteer is brilliant. Don’t walk past the puppeteer if he’s around. Sundays are usually his days.

I love the museums, most of them free, the one with the ancient scrolls, the one with the Vikings and the bodies of the possibly ritually sacrificed un-true kings. And the museum of a museum. Don’t miss those!

I love the way the traffic goes nowhere, I love the fact that I can cycle all year round, and can so easily over take all the cars in the way. I love the way nobody bothers to wait for the little green men.

I love the mosques, the plethora of little Asian shops, the easy availability of halloumi, halva and Polish sausages. The fact that everywhere you go, you are but one in a sea of foreigners.

I love the sea, the mountains, the vegetable soup in a pub on a Sunday.

It’s a great place.

Last night I stood on the bus stop for 45 minutes, waiting for a bus that according to the timetable runs every 20 minutes. There were three number 3s and five 46As while I waited. 9 busses passed us by with the sign “Out of Service” on them.

There were people on the bus stop, who were there before me, waiting for the same bus. When I arrived, they already had that look about them that you get once you’ve already waited for too long. “I have been standing here for ages already, it may be cold, it may be feckin’ freezing, it may rain, but I will stand here till the bus comes, be that today or tomorrow”, which I took to mean that they had already stood there for a while, so the bus should come soon enough. And with every passing minute the likelihood of the bus actually coming constantly increasing. After 20 minutes of waiting, it is hard to make the decision to just walk, when you know the walk home takes nearly 40 minutes, and the bus that gets you there in 10 minutes could come any minute now.

I love my bus, it is great. It stops right outside my front door, such luxury; it takes tiny little roads in and out of town. Tiny scenic little roads with speed limits making it possible for grannies to overtake the traffic, speed bumps every five meters ensuring drivers keep to these speed limits – thus ensuring that there is no traffic, thus ensuring that this bus taking this route gets to town much much faster than any of the other busses, the ones that use the big roads, inevitably getting stuck in the traffic, which is always mad, morn, noon and night. And almost always the bus, my bus, comes within minutes of my arriving on the bus stop. Once or twice I’ve had to wait the full 20. And twice now, 45 minutes.

Nobody complained. The Irish stood their ground in the queue waiting for the bus that never came without a word. (Though there were a few yelps when a strong gust of wind knocked one of the grannies over.) And when the bus, the glorious bus, finally appeared out of the gloom, there was a communal sigh of happiness, joy, and a mad rush to try and get into the bus. So much for the queue.

But maybe a bit of complaining would help? One of the Out of Service busses could possibly have picked us up, and ran an extra run? There was a full bus load of us, after all. The bus driver of the bus that finally arrived knew. Oh he knew. He looked at the freezing lot of us feeling sorry, a little bit of guilt mixed in his sympathetic smile. He knew. It would have taken a couple of phone calls to find a spare bus to pick us up. I am sure there would have been one driver among the nine going off duty who wouldn’t have minded the extra pay. Or would have at least felt sorry enough for us, stranded out in the cold November night.

Maybe somebody ought to point this out to Dublin Bus.

The grannies seemed to think that it is God’s Law that busses sometimes just don’t show up, but you know, somebody could actually do something about this.
If they could be bothered. Not sure that I can.