Sunday, December 13

I am having more success with my morning walk this morning. I have opted to walk through the woods where the ground is rougher and the slipping less frequent.

Naa will return home in time to join us in a visit to Pakala.

Later I will finish reading the book by Erkki Tuomoija that I have been working through. It is called A Delicate Shade of Pink, it is about his grandmother and her sister, and it won a Finnish Non-fiction award in 2006. I am surprised not because it is uninteresting but because it is an endless list of characters with very little analysis.

I have now gained the impression that for much of the twentieth century the Finnish cultural and political elite consisted of about eighteen people who took turns at liking and disliking each other. Hella Wuolijoki had public roles as a dramatist, a business-woman in “export and import”, a model capitalist a century too late with an estate like a rural Bournville, and managing director of YLE, where she performed her own plays and got people to interview her. She was also (probably) a spy, possibly a double agent, certainly sentenced to life imprisonment and then released a year or so later when the government changed, and a lifelong self-dramatist.

Her sister, Salme Pekkala-Dutt, appears to have been the main force behind the British Communist Party for twenty or thirty years.

I looked out of the window to see that the weather had changed and the promised snow had finally appeared. My head spinning, I went to bed.