Spellbound

September 19, 2007 - Dear Mr. President
Originally uploaded by wesleyenglish

One of the things - and one of the most worrying ones - that I have realised in the course of the last year is that I am starting to have difficulties with the Finnish language. I don't mean in a chit chat sort of situation but when I need to do writing. It is a bit bizarre really - mastering Finnish language was my prime skill until 2005 and now I see it deteriorating.

This is why last Sunday did not feel at all like work although I had three deadlines to live up to. I had promised to deliver in the beginning of this week three short articles in Finnish so I was really up to a test.

I realised at one point that I had been writing without a break for three hours. I was playing with words, checking every sentence whether I could say thing differently, reading my text out loud and so forth. I closed the doors to my working space as the smell of bacon from our joint kitchen was finding its way into the living room. At some point - like in a trance - I walked into the kitchen, took a bag of crisps, walked back to my room and continued working on the texts one hand in the chips. At six o'clock I found myself sitting in a dark living room, dressed in a beanie, Moroccan baggy trousers, wrinkled shirt and grandpa slippers surrounded by a teacup, a coffee cup, a tea pot, an empty crisps bag, a plate with bread crumbs, piles of paper and a variety of pens. I felt like a true writer.

Today I printed the texts out at work, finalised them in the evening and sent them forward. I realised again what I love so much - taking a point and molding it into a statement. Finnish is a wunderbar language.