Thursday, June 1

 

 

And so it went as suddenly as it came. Yesterday I woke up with my left leg feeling as though it had suffered a lengthy hammer attack in the night. All yesterday I limped and could hardly put any weight on it. This morning I woke up with both legs feeling completely normal.

I had Tesco Nut Clusters for breakfast. Yesterday afternoon Irma and I had raced to Prisma alerted to the fact that the S-Group had done a deal with Tesco to stock 2000 products in the Tesco Finest and Free From… ranges. We saw cheeses, pastas, breakfast cereals and ice-cream. We raced back with a tub of ice-cream and ate it. We wondered whether that fact that it cost just less than half the equivalent tub of Ben & Jerry’s cookie dough ice-cream might have a disruptive effect on Finnish retailing.

Afterwards I shaved. Not only did I shave, I changed the razor blade in my Lidl Shark 5 razor for the first time in months. I decided to note this down here in order to see exactly how long this blade lasts.

When I got outside this morning I looked for my bike and it had gone. I then remembered that, in our excitement about the cookie dough and chocolate brownie ice-cream we had forgotten to stop at Puotila so I could collect it. I walked there this morning and whatsapped Irma a photo to show that it had not gone missing overnight.

I spent almost the whole day at Arcada helping students who needed to graduate today. I printed out theses, signed forms and answered long and complicated questions.

I also sorted out a WordPress installation problem for an alumnus in Turku who had a problem on a freelance job. I failed to grade a course because Its Learning refused to work on my computer.

I spent a couple of hours with Emilia and Josefin who have researched Buddy Cafes for Irma and now need to put together a report that sums up their findings and suggested what needs to get done next. My part in the meeting consisted of asking naive questions and then listening to their answers and commenting. They seemed to have everything under control.

At 15:00 I noticed a thin, hard summer rain falling outside. I left when it had stopped.

At 17:45 we left the house for Gumbostrand. We have two tasks: to look at the new exhibition, and to collect the painting Irma bought in the previous one. We wonder around for an hour or so, champagne glasses in hand. This exhibition has five or six artists in it. I see some things that I like and much that I don’t. I see some small, heavily treated photographs that I like but Irma rightly points out that I could spend the money on a “proper” camera and do them myself. She has a serious point, because the reason I like them stems from the fact that they closely resemble the photographs I would take if I had the equipment and time.

Irma has a “proper” with macro lens, so maybe we could share it and make art in the summer. We could then have the exhibition we talked about in Kovalam next January.