Doing nothing in a foreign language

Lifestyle gurus (who are these people?) are constantly telling us how to live our lives and I suppose we must want to be told, judging by the many millions of books and products that are sold as a result. In recent years this lifestyle advice has involved unpronounceable foreign words like hygge and gezelligheid, with endless magazine articles, books and soft-focus pictures explaining in great detail exactly how to incorporate them into our lives. It really doesn’t seem that complicated to me – as far as I can tell they just mean ‘warm and cosy’, but there’s nothing like a difficult word to make things seem more complicated than they are. The legal profession has been doing it for years.

I see that yet another foreign word has been co-opted into the lifestyle vocabulary: niksen, the Dutch word for doing nothing. At least we can pronounce this one, but surely the Dutch can’t claim that they invented the fine art of doing nothing? The British have a long tradition of dossing about and skiving off, and I can’t imagine that we’re the only ones. If I proudly announced that this winter I intended to do nothing, then people would either laugh and ask how that was any different from last winter, or look at me with pity because I was so lacking in ambition. If I said instead that I was planning to embrace niksen, I’m sure they’d all be impressed. Perhaps using a fancy foreign word seems so much more convincing because it sounds like you’ve put some thought into it. Anyone can doss about, but niksen is only for the enlightened few.

I don’t understand how a whole industry has been built on telling people to put on a warm jumper and sit with a cup of hot chocolate in front of a log fire. How difficult can it be? But still people want to be told how to do it. I think I’d enjoy being a lifestyle guru, but first I need to think of a current trend that has yet to be exploited and then give it an exotic name. What’s left? We’ve already been told how to be cosy and how to do nothing, and we’ve also been told how to take a walk in the woods. The Japanese art of forest bathing, shinrin-yoku, is the subject of countless books and articles already.

I’ve got it – the joy of doing jigsaw puzzles. The Finnish for this is iloa palapeli, which I think is the perfect name for my new movement. I’ll write a book that will tell people how to take the pieces out of the box, place them on a flat surface and then fit them all together. It will be lavishly illustrated with pictures of Moomin jigsaws. I could even suggest background music such as Janis Joplin’s Piece of My Heart.  Yes, iloa palapeli is definitely the way forward. You read it here first.