Writer in Residence

My name is Kim Kane, this is my first blog and I’m nervous. I keep wondering whether a maiden blog is like a maiden voyage and whether I should be smashing a bottle of champagne over my laptop. I’m going to refrain from doing that, however, because I like champagne far too much to waste it on a computer, because this computer is the tool of my trade and the only asset I own apart from a fridge, and because I would probably get in trouble as this is an underage site and Who Knows where it could lead. One smashed bottle of champagne and the whole palaver turn up on facebook and the next thing I know Corey Worthington will be on my doorstep with 2000 of his mates to lick the grog out between the keys and generally wreak havoc. No, siree. This maiden voyage will be blue light.

Now, none of that explains what I’m actually doing on this site next to a bevy of far more accomplished authors. Well, I’m here because I’ve just had my first novel, Pip: the story of Olive , published. If you haven’t heard of it, that’s okay because it’s only been out for a few weeks and it hasn’t even been launched yet. If you have heard of it and you haven’t read it, that’s okay too, because my partner hasn’t managed to get past chapter three and the book is dedicated to him plus he has known me for a lot longer than you (you’ve really only known me for just over a paragraph).

Tonight I’ve been working on the Dutch version of my novel — assisting the very lovely woman who is translating it for me. She has asked for the English meaning of some pretty funny things — things we completely take for granted. Now, don’t get me wrong, this woman is a very skilled translator, actually a prize-winning translator and I can’t even read a tram ticket in Holland, but she wanted to know what mosquito coils, honeycomb and bogcatchers are.

Trying to explain honeycomb was particularly difficult, but if they don’t have honeycomb in Holland I think I have some serious issues with that country, especially because I happen to know that one of their national foods is salted licorice and everyone knows that licorice is disgusting and that there is very good reason why the black jellybeans are always left at the bottom of the pack. Salted licorice must therefore be particularly mouth-puckeringly horrid. But licorice aside, imagine a world without Violet Crumbles? Crunchies? Hokey-pokey ice cream? They are the top three bricks on my own personal food pyramid. Without these, what does it matter how great your sausages are? (The Dutch do have great sausages.)

These problems with food have extended across the Channel. In England, they had never heard of chocolate crackles and they struggled with the idea of butterscotch pudding. I have to admit that I have never actually eaten butterscotch pudding but I can tell what it might be by its name and I can tell that it’s probably all sugary and buttery and steamy and delicious and exactly the sort of thing my mother never made when I was growing up because I had a desperately deprived childhood and she was too busy with bran.

Anyway, because the English don’t have butterscotch pudding I couldn’t include it in the English version of my book (which I think explains why I was forced to forced to migrate to Australia from London when I was a kid). Man, those Poms are deprived. But that got me thinking, because apart from this obvious difference, there are more cultural similarities between Australia and the UK than most people realise. I think this critical discrepancy, however, might have something to do with the uncanny similarity between the word poms meaning English people and the word pommes meaning apple in French. As both words are pronounced exactly the same and French was once the official language of England, there is a very real possibility that the Royal British Dental Society has actually sabotaged English national identity: got right to the core (excuse the pun).

No, all this book process has taught me is that when it comes to dessert, this is the country you want to be in. Although my best friend Alice maintains that in Spain the hot chocolate is so thick the spoons stand up in it and the pastries are the size of dinner plates. Now that’s a translation I’d like to work on…