Today is my name-day - or was, as the day is nearly over. Not to worry, there'll be another one next year. As a child, I almost used to prefer name days (but oh, God damn, but I can't think what the proper spelling is - keep trying different ways and they each look as wrong as the other. Must check. Moment, please, gentle Reader. Right. Sorry about that - but my friend, Wikipedia, has now informed me name day is indeed the correct spelling. So now that all that is alright, I can go back to claiming that in my childhood, I almost used to prefer name days) to birthdays - less fuss, the "lightness" of the occasion allowing for just some slightly-special party fun, without pressure. Besides, the season was more appealing - being born in early-ish Autumn meant I had always only just returned to school, on each and every birthday - and I never enjoyed returning to school, whereas on my name day, the weather had a beautiful crispy bite, the snow was high and clean, the night came early and dark, and the stars were bright. Yay me and, in particular, yay the weather of the days that were.
So that was that. On the other hand, today sees my three-hundredth blog post. I am quite amazed at the number, myself - this means that, as I haven't been here for quite three years yet, I must have - on average - blogged (roughly) every three days. Given that I know I'm prone to the occasional month-long silence, I must have been ridiculously prolific at other times. Yay me, once more (I think - as a fair amount of it is complete codswallop).
So that was that. Apart from these heady double celebrations, I've been thinking, today, about a certain blanket I had for many, many years - sky blue, hemmed with large white stitches of some ilk, whose corners I used to gnaw in the boredom of a four-year-old made to take daytime naps at Steiner school, on which I changed the nappies of my first-born, and which I lost on a post-sunbathing pub crawl session with the man who'd become my second ex-husband (although I wouldn't have believed you if you'd told me that then). Not so yay me, in this instance.
And that, gentle Reader, is that. Except that today, I noticed, once again, how lucky I am to have a job which really comforts one in feelings of existential loneliness, in the fear-dread of the aloneness of life and death, that sort of jolly stuff. Fleeting moments of contact, in which I will go on.
And that - really, honestly, truly - is that, for tonight. A wetly-snowy Helsinki bids you goodnight. Thank you for listening.
Tuesday, December 09, 2008
I still miss that old thing, from time to time
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
And a Yay from me too, dear FomPie. How auspicious that on this day the words "lightness" and "luck" (and the letter L itself being a bringer of light, as all good Steinery children know in their souls) should illuminate your path; or at least the place where you stand.
We don't have name days hereabouts, and if we did I wonder which day would be allocated to Signs. There would have to be a saint called that, and there are none as far as I am aware.
Oh, and yay for your 300th blog post, and particularly yay for you being back here sharing your thoughts, reflections and lovely words.
Lovely Ladyprince, 'lo. I can't really even begin to express how pleased I was to find we do indeed have a name day allocated to Signs - please, lay aside the lesser worry of no nameday, sweet sees, for I present you with 21st August - the name day of Soini. (Do please imagine someone terribly Oirish pronouncing the word "sign", and just add an -i at the end - Finnish can be made of most words by adding an -i at the end). The matter is made immeasurably better by the fact that Oi, a Finn, had to do some research to foind out whether "Soini" is a man's or a woman's name (there's no rule, rhyme, or reason to this, in Finnish - you just have to know, a fact which, particularly when coupled with the lack of gender-specific third-person pronouns, leaves foreigners delightfully baffled). The results of this research delighted me even further, for I found that Soini is a variant of the Swedish name Sven, which means "a boy, youth"; that the name has been known since the Middle Ages; and that by the end of July 2006, 1531 people had been given the name (presumably since modern records start, rather than since the Middle Ages), of whom 142 have been women.
Behold - I give you your fully Finnish name, complete with nameday and some gender-bending, and with an Oirish twist, Soini of Our Toimes.
Mwah and mweh and mwoih and oh, thank you most profusely for calling my words lovely.
Post a Comment