When I was 7, my teacher told us to write an article about “world cultures” for school over the weekend. I remembered it late on Sunday so in a panic I made up something called the "Icelandic Fish Festival", figuring said teacher wouldn’t know either way.
Sr Veronica was one of my favourite teachers. She was a Glaswegian nun who wore a leg brace due to a childhood bout of polio, and would tell us all about it. She was funny and kind, and always encouraged me writing things. This kind of homework would have been very usual for her.
I wasn't gonna let her down. So I stayed up all night making sure the essay delivered on the premise. As it got later and later, it became a bit more unhinged. Filled with asides and personal reportage. I believe I quoted "the King of Iceland" as if he'd spoken to me personally.
Can’t remember a lot about the Icelandic Fish Festival itself, but I said it lasted four months (!) and involved everyone eating, and dressing as, fish. Some of it was written present tense. Was I *at* the festival? Did I go every year? Who's to say? This was eight pages long.
Can’t remember a lot about the Icelandic Fish Festival itself, but I said it lasted four months (!) and involved everyone eating, and dressing as, fish. Some of it was written present tense. Was I *at* the festival? Did I go every year? Who's to say? This was eight pages long.
The next morning I woke up with pen on my face, gathered the sheets of my report like an architect in a rom-com and readied myself to present it, surely the finest report to cross her desk all year.
In the event, Sr Veronica seemed utterly bemused when I handed it in, for two main reasons. Yes, this was a completely insane report, about a very clearly made-up festival, delivered with the breathless cheeriness of a segment on A Place In The Sun. But it was worse than that.
We once took the packet boat down the length of the Norwegian coast and I believe every little town you stop at has a museum to the herring. Those Nordics are serious about fish. If Iceland *doesn’t* have a four month fish festival then, honestly, they don’t get to call themselves Scandinavian.
Here is a photo to illustrate the school report (it’s from Helsinki’s annual Herring festival at the start of October, where people sell herring in different ways from the sides of their boats).
When I was 7, I asked my mother to trip me to the bay and put me on a ship. Lower me down, lower me out of here. Cos when I was 7, I wanted to live in a bathysphere
