This summer, I had a writing residency in Denmark. Residencies can be odd; the premise sounds luxurious – nothing to do except write your book – but for exactly that reason, they can be uncomfortable. You’re there for a job of work. There are no more excuses: face the page and write. I was finishing a novel, which is easier than starting one, and I’d been aching to go back to it through a busy time at work, so the writing part was difficult only in a rewarding way. The house was plain and simple and wholly adequate, which suited me, and most of the other writers, all Danish and Swedish, were pleasant.
I kept finding myself chopping vegetables in the communal kitchen at the same time as a Swedish writer whom I knew to have the usual excellent English. Evening, I said when I came in, how are you, did you have a good day today? He shrugged, muttered something like a teenager asked about his school day. The weather was lovely, I said, wasn’t it, did you get outside at all? No, he said. No eye contact. I had a great run this morning, I said, there was still mist on the lake and then the sun broke through all at once. He didn’t reply. I chopped an onion. He chopped an onion. I tried to keep my mouth shut but the silence was too loud. Is your book coming on well then, I asked. He shrugged again. I got the message. I chopped a carrot, he chopped a pepper. We kept silence.
The delicacy of Irish conversational dancing still sometimes makes me feel a bit Nordic
I recounted this interaction to a Danish friend. It wasn’t personal, she said, only he didn’t understand why you kept asking these questions. We don’t do small talk. It just seems like making a noise. I wasn’t going to ask him his favourite sexual position or his bank balance, I said, I was just being polite. You know, here we are, humans in the same place at the same time doing the same thing, we make human noises to show we come in peace. Not where he comes from, she said, for him your noises are disturbing the peace. I miss Ireland, I said, and I tried to be quieter for the rest of the fortnight. It’s not personal, it’s cultural, I told myself when I felt rejected. It’s not personal, it’s cultural. Repeat.
I did miss Ireland. I like a chat. I like people. I like stories. I felt reproached by the Swedish writer’s silence, like a silly woman who doesn’t know when to shut up. I recognised that I had been unwittingly intrusive, probably seemed as rude to him as he did to me.
I was taught to avoid the ‘trap’ of cooking but I take pleasure in domestic life
I had my kids in my mid-20s, which was unheard of among women of my class and generation
Men are deemed more masculine for taking up more space, women more feminine for taking up less
Only mothers who find recognition in professional life seem to be guilty of ‘having it all’
The encounter made me think again about being English in Ireland, where I can often sense that I’m being indelicate, too frank, without knowing how else I should communicate. I should tone myself down, take an indirect approach, but often I can’t see how that approach might go. I’ve learned not to put anyone in a position where they might have to say a blunt “no”, always to gesture towards a dignified exit for both parties should an agreement not be agreeable, at least sometimes to recognise an Irish “no” (or “yes”) that seems to me dressed as ambiguity or postponement, but I’m sure I still miss a lot.
I think I can usually now receive on at least a Dublin frequency, but I haven’t learned to broadcast on it reliably, and in the west I just listen very closely. People forgive: ah sure she can’t help it, being English. I am grateful. I know that, unlike a Swedish person (not) talking to an English person, an English person in Ireland speaks with eight centuries of history gesticulating over her shoulder.
I know that Irish indirectness is born of precisely that history. I’m a writer, of course I enjoy dances with words, but the delicacy of Irish conversational dancing still sometimes makes me feel a bit Nordic, a bit Swedish, as if there’s some west-east spectrum of European light-footedness in speech, from the west of Ireland through my part of England all the way to Russia.
It’s not personal, it’s cultural. Repeat.
I probably didn’t mean that the way it might have come out.