About Me
I'm sorry, she's gone. She was born in Northern Finland, was lured by the wicked metropolis of Helsinki, and after eloping to the Middle East, being held at gun-point in at the Heart of Darkness off the coast of Africa, and nearly drowning in the refreshing heated swimming pool of Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo, her life has finally morphed into that of a respectable housewife living in the nice part of Sheffield with too much time in her hands. Hence this page.
I have taken the alias of Mrs. Duprat, cut my hair, allowed the sun to touch my delicate scandinavian skin and starved my once lush young body so that my old drinking buddies from Helsinki would not recognize me as I am about to commence my secret life on-line.
Tiina Raudaskoski is desperately sought by the nice "fumeur avec le gentil chien" who is renting her old party pad in sea-side Helsinki, her publisher who already paid her for a novel that is yet to be finished, her ex-boyfriend to whom she owes her finest years and 10 000 euros, her best friend, her neighbor, her twin sister, her body-double, who says she has lost her mind, and, herself. Her mind doesn't know where she has gone. Where to begin? Has the search for my true identity already started without me?
The respectable french-speaking femme au foyer, Madame Duprat, on the other hand, is wanted by the German polizei, British Gas, BT, and N-Power for five-hundred quid, three lost passports and allegedly giving a fake name while buying a Free view box in order to avoid paying for a TV-license.
"Tiina, Iina, Tinushka, ma chérie", I say and write as I create my new personality, and finally I imitate the broad Yorkshire dialect when pronouncing "Missus DyyPrääät" like the fair-haired ladies do behind the glass windows at the bank, the post and the GP's surgery. "You forgot your receipt, Missus Dyypräät." "Thina Dyprät to doctor Who-Ever, room four." "A Polish name, right?" "No, I am not Polish and neither is my name. And for that matter, it is pronounced Du-prat, Dyprätt, the T in the end is silent." And with that one nervous utter I assumed my identity as the short-haired, immaculately dry-cleaned and acid-peeled lady of leisure who used to claim to have once been a promising novelist and playwright. And look, it is happening in front of our eyes; I leave my old personality to dissolve into megabites and disappeared files, and let it re-form, start again from an empty de-coded screen. Or as I could have put it, when I still was my old self and a poet: "from page one." This, what follows, is my new life.
