Dear Thanos

My notes and research were all prepared to give you a comprehensive answer to your letter last issue about Tony Blair and the UK elections, but then you wrote to me again asking an interesting question: After three years in this country do you feel a Finn?

Yes, I feel my Finnish wife Päivi everyday, but this was not what you expected. You want to know if my English identity has been replaced by any Finnish characteristics or whether I feel entitled to that much-desired Finnish passport that Finns believe every world citizen covets…it's like winning the lottery being born a Finn, which explains why Finland has one of the highest suicide rates in Europe.

Firstly, I will never become a Finn officially or mentally and, secondly, I never want to become a Finn officially or mentally. Since the United Kingdom is a European Union member that means you cannot become a citizen of another EU member, such as Finland. However, even if I were permitted the chance to apply then the offer would be politely declined.

Bernard Manning, a politically incorrect British comedian in the 1970s, once infamously joked, "If a dog is born in a stable then it isn't a horse!" The comment naturally brought accusations of racism, in my situation I can understand what he is saying. Just because I live in Finland does not make me a Finn, although I have tried to integrate by eating the hay.

My daughter is due to arrive in the next few days/weeks and we will be faced with the decision of her nationality. If the father is English then she is legally English, but if the mother is Finnish then she is also legally Finnish, maybe we shall call her European. The boundaries of nationality are being blurred through children such as our daughter. For example, I met a guy living in Finland whose parents were refugees from Vietnam when he was a child, they learnt the Swedish language and now he is dating a girl from Afghanistan - that is multi-cultural and confusing.

It will be daughter's choice when to use each of her nationalities and there will be situations in which one or the other will be more beneficial. My wife will buy her Suomi ice hockey jerseys and I will supply the England football shirts, but she has the option to use either - I may encourage her decision by rubbing a dead fish over the Finnish shirts.

One advantage she will have is mastering at least two languages by an early age, which was an issue for me when I first arrived in Finland. Following a few language courses I began to find my English was suffering and that is dangerous when you list your profession as a journalist/writer. Losing your language ability is something you have had encountered and we have both expressed sadness at those individuals who have lost their native tongue living in Finland for 20-years.

Learning Finnish has only helped me with my Finnish in-laws, since everybody else immediately sees that I am foreign in appearance and puts their brain into English. This means that when I speak in Finnish they do not understand these strange English words and we all lose confidence in our abilities. The language courses teach you a form of language only used in literature, they tend to forget the spoken language, the slang on the streets.

As for your point about complaining of life in Finland, well this is a subject we are both baffled about. We are expected to spend our money in Finnish shops, pay Finnish taxes and buy Finnish products, but should we raise our voice about anything we are shouted down and told to return home. This makes me smile; we have an iKritic section reviewing movies but neither of us has ever made a film and we can complain about bad food in a restaurant despite neither of being chefs, these are permissible, but to complain about the place we live is not. Huh?

I suppose my question back to you is of a similar vain. You have not lived in Greece since the early-80s, you worked in the UK for 10 years and got British citizenship, and now you are raising a family in Finland, so my question is: Do Greeks break plates after dinner?

Asa