The Finnish Imposter

I can’t believe I have never been to Scandinavia. I have meant to, so many times. To go to Elsinore where Hamlet takes place. To visit the birthplace of so many friends over the years. These elegant floaty type people who have wandered through my life. A college friend of my sisters. An old girlfriend of my brothers. My mother’s friend Nina who had a blonde plait all the way down her back. My friend who still visits her mothers family home on an island of the Norwegian coast every summer. They all spoke English with the lightest of touches and the odd curve of a syllable showing that this language wasn’t their first. They all had and have eyes that reflect an achingly open sky. I can say it was because as a family we headed south to the Mediterranean and the tablecloth sized apartment that my parents had bought before I was a teenager. I can say that when I was traveling on my own I wanted to conquer the strangeness of farther shores before I got a ferry across the North Sea to countries that I had seen in Bergman films. When I went to work in America, I didn’t take holidays in the same way. It was people whom I missed. So I went to where they were. Be it the UK, or New Zealand, or Greece. But last week I landed in Scandinavia. Finland to be exact.

I got off a plane into an acutely organized airport and found myself on a train heading north to a small city or a large town called Tampere. It was a nice hotel, a nice room, with a view above the rooftops.

I went downstairs having put my toothbrush in a glass and asked if they had a bicycle I could use. Ten minutes, armed with a map, wearing a red helmet, I was out there. If I had been walking with a map I would have felt self-conscious. But with my yellow bag in the basket and my red helmet and knowing there were no cliffs I could drive off or motorways I could accidentally join, I rode and rode along by the river, away from the river, up and down the streets that had little strips marked out on the pavements for me and my bike. Nobody fussed. Cars stopped, pedestrians accommodated, me and my other friends on their bikes just ambled along getting where we were going whenever we could get there. The thing was I didn’t know where I was going. And so it continued for these days I was in Tampere. I went to beaches, arboretums, museums, harbours, look-outs. On my bike with no gears. One day I took a ferry out to an island. I bought myself some wild raspberries from this lovely farmer who had a little table on the dock with onions and peas and chanterelle mushrooms and berries. He is going in September to the beaches at Normandy. We had a lovely chat about that.

Because one of the oddest things here is that everyone speaks English. Everyone. Some young girl said it as because they watch television. But I don’t think it is that. I think they must have a curiosity. After all, they speak a language which reverberates in a very small circle around them. They just have it their back pocket.

Finnish is not an easy language. The street signs are unrecognizable. The language as you listen to it, is impossible to guess at. And then I have to mention breakfast. In no particular order: Porridge made with milk, salt and butter. Kale pesto. Lingonberry sauce. Pickled cauliflower Thick white yoghurt with cloudberry powder. Reindeer sausage. ( I just looked at that one) Rye bread. Chanterelle mushrooms.

There was this lovely woman who worked on the crew for breakfasts at the hotel. Her name was Jaana. She noticed I was alone. She guided me to a table with a good view.

She brought me my two pots of tea in the morning. The first, black. the second, Roobos. She told me how good the porridge was. I found out where she lived and what her hours were. I didn’t get much more than that. I don’t know if she had children or if she still liked the man she had married. She learned nothing much about me. On my last day I asked if I could take a photo of her. I told her I wanted a photo for this “ Thing” that I write. She got sort of embarrassed and sort of posed.

I think that people like her are a part of how people like me can travel alone. When I handed in my key card, the receptionist said I had a gift. Jaana had left me a package of the porridge. With instructions of how to make it at home. And a note. All of which is packed in my suitcase. I have no words for how big and small that made me feel. And I just want to go on the record that I didn’t pretend to be Finnish. Everyone just assumed I was. Maybe there is a stamp of someone who looks like me. Or there is a shampoo bottle with a face like mine on it. But I turned up anywhere and people launched at me with streams of the Finnish language. It took me two or three goes of “ I’m sorry.” before they stopped and heard my British bleatings and said ..” oh”. They still kept their eyes on me, thinking I might collapse into what surely must be my mother tongue. Apparently I look Finnish. People in the shops, In the museums. On the streets when I made a dodgy maneuver on my bike. When I sat in the wrong seat on the train. They all were so sure. Made me question my heritage . For a good long minute.

The church of the theatre

This last week there was the funeral for my friend Angela, who I wrote about earlier.

It had taken a long time to arrive for a lot of reasons. One of which was that her boys wanted to have the occasion at St Paul’s Church in Covent Garden and there wasn’t a date available for all the activities they were having there. St Paul’s church is in the middle, and I mean the middle, of Covent Garden.

Designed by Inigo Jones in 1631, he meant for it to have an opening onto the cobblestones of the old fruit and flower market. But he seems he hadn’t done his research into Christian laws and since the altar had to be at the east end, at the last minute the doors were bricked up and a Portico without an entrance stands there. It is in under that same portico that George Bernard Shaw had his Eliza Doolittle meet his Henry Higgins as she was hawking her bunches of violets in “Pygmalion.” It is where Barry Foster was chased in the 1972 Hitchcock film “ Frenzy.” But now it is known as the place the magicians, the musicians and the acrobats set up to do their acts for the tourists and visitors on a daily basis. The reason why Rupert and Laurie wanted to have the service there, is because St Paul’s Covent Garden is also known as the Actors Church.

It is where Actors take their last bows, so to speak, and the place is alive with their names. It was closed to the public for Angela’s funeral. Normally the grounds and the gardens are open. I myself, sat there back in July and read the entire Guardian newspaper on a sunny Saturday. There are benches and small lawns. There are shaded areas and sunny areas. there are walkways of old slabs of stone and beds of roses. The church is open, when there isn’t a service, to everyone. There are stairs up from the foyer to the left with a sign saying dressing rooms. To the right there is the office where the vicar, Simon a bright and friendly man, who was in shorts when I went back the following day to retrieve my glasses, and his equally bright and friendly staff, have their office. Simon is quoted that if he isn’t at the church he can be found “at a bar, the theatre or the gym.” The church is square. There are windows without stained glass. It feels very simple and almost puritanical in it’s layout. There isn’t much gold or pictures of Jesus. It is full of light and it is full of wood. The pews are all wood. The walls are paneled in wood. And everywhere there are names. Names on the walls denote someone who has been given some honor by the Queen. Names on the back of the pews denote someone who hasn’t. The benches outside all have dedications to someone who was an actor or who worked with actors and is now declaiming with clarity somewhere else.

Walking round the church on the day I went to collect my glasses was a bit like that. it was a cast list of the finest. Of course Ian Holm is dead. Diana Rigg too. I knew that. And the older legends of Margaret Leighton and Kenneth More. And the odd shocking one like Helen McCrory. But being remembered on the wood of this Actor’s church, feels like the finest of clubs. when the doors are closed and the light is still coming through those windows of a summer evening, do they have one last go at “ Cymbeline” ? Does somebody emerge to sort out that second act of Shaw’s “ Man and Superman”? Do the “Lovies” collect in one corner and call each other Darling and say how good they still look. Do the heavyweights collect in another wearing black turtle necks and smoking as they discuss breath control and John Osborne. Most people who visit the church don’t know who these names are. And as time goes by those numbers will increase. They explain to each other that Helen McCrory was in Harry Potter, that Ian Holm was Bilbo Baggins. That Vivien Leigh was in “ Gone with the Wind.” But who will know John Tydeman’s name unless you worked on BBC Radio? Who will remember Brian Rix and his wife Elspet Gray, who revived stage farce?

And are there maybe a handful of people who would know my friend , Sean Arnold, who I thought was still knocking around in Jersey, but it seems left us in 2020 and is now remembered on a back of a pew. Laurie said they are going to donate money to have one inscribed for Angela along with Peter. I like that the idea of that. I will be back to stand in front of that one. And maybe I’ll sing “ Jerusalem “ to myself if I can find a patch of sunlight. “ and did those feet in ancient times, Walk upon England’s pastures green….”