Wednesday, January 20

I missed the bus again by one minute this morning and the next bus was five minutes late. I either need to get there on time or I need thicker gloves. Or both.

In Sörnäinen I went to Lidl to buy ingredients for lunch for the next three days. It was the first time I had been there in about nine months, because I walked from Kalasatama for the last six months or so, and only started using the tram when the snow began. There was a noticeable difference between this Lidl and the new one near Kalasatama. This one is much more downmarket and has a much narrower assortment. It didn’t have the Greek yogurts I was looking for but it had everything else.

In the morning I ordered two books and two cds from Amazon. Three of the four will be very useful for the courses I am running this Spring and all of them are things that I have been meaning to buy for some time. Even more appealingly, three out of the four were at least 60% of the price I would have paid if I had ordered them the last time I thought about it.

I then carried on planning the courses for which they will be valuable material. I finished my submission for my pedagogical credentials and sent them for comments. Then I got my ingredients out of the fridge.

I have now assembled and eaten my Lidl lunch and I am wandering the building for exercise, and to generate the random encounters from which unexpected ideas sometimes spring. I meet two students and the beginnings of an idea emerge. By the time I get back to my desk I have already forgotten it and am thinking about something else entirely.

In the early afternoon Jutta and I will have a long Skype call about a whole range of planning issues, some of which were so secret that she couldn’t even tell me about them. At these points she will hold up a blank piece of paper and I will nod in agreement.

At 15:00 Tomas, Vilja and I will have a Skype conference. I will be at Arcada, Tomas will be at home in Helsinki, and Vilja will be at home in Berlin. We will discuss her MA assignment for the course we are leading and Skype will flicker merrily in and out of focus. Her project is about recycling waste and at the end of the meeting I will suggest, with my tongue only slightly in my cheek, that she should consider having the next Skype meeting from a MacDonalds, where the wifi might be better than in her apartment.

At this point darkness will fall and I will remember the idea I had in the corridor. I will write it down and leave for home, where I will engage in receational ironing for an hour or so.