Tuesday, October 25

As I prepared to leave the house this morning, Irma arrived back inside from collecting the daily paper. She warned me that she had felt drizzle. I felt it too as I got on my bike. Two hundred metres from the house I realised that the snow that YLE had promised in yesterday’s news had in fact arrived. The “drizzle” I cycled through merited the description “fully fledged snowstorm”. Only the darkness had prevented me spotting it before I started cycling.

One of the brand new metros turned up at Puotila and I got on for, I think, the first time. All the older metros consist of a number of carriages. The newest have less but longer carriages, with more opportunity to walk from one part to another. This metro has no internal doors at all and, on an empty train, you could walk front the front right down to the back. I cannot take a photograph showing this because this train has barely any room to stand.

Instead I photograph the train as it leaves Sörnäinen station. It has a distinctive shape and I watch as it leaves.

A pitch black sky will still hang over Helsinki when I get to Arcada. It will only get lighter about 10:00. By that point I will have proofread almost half of the forty page report Christa has sent me to look at before Nobanet submits it. I will spend a couple of hours changing prepositions and adding articles to sentences, in addition to rewriting whole chunks where the meaning shines but dimly through the verbiage.

I will finally finish just before midday when I briefly will look at the material I have gathered for the book chapter I need to write this week for a deadline that expires on Friday afternoon.

I will receive and answer an email from Jack. Casey has not yet received his Duplo and they would all like to see me at the end of November. Jack will also suggest that we should all keep in regular contact via Skype. Once I have recovered from the surprise (I didn’t think Jack used Skype) I will agree wholeheartedly.

In the afternoon I will hold two tutorials, arrange a first draft of Bryan’s itinerary, have a planning discussion with Jutta, have another with Tomas and Liisa, read the first draft of a student thesis, update the Convivial Mechanics website, add the information to Pixelache’s website, and look anxiously out of the window from time to time to see if the snow has made any plans to return.

I will also have a brief Skype chat with Luke, currently in Chiang Mai with Alice, and hoping to spend Christmas in Myanmar before going to Melbourne for a couple of months.

At home we will pull sheets, some in the Lutheran way, and I will iron them. The Indian Embassy will interfere in my travel plans and I will realise that my trip to London will not occur before Christmas. Irma will book me a very cheap flight in February, and I will decide that I will now work backwards. I will announce my arrival and departure dates and challenge other people to fit in with them.

I will go to bed early.