Tuesday, July 11

 

 

Irma woke at 8:00 and I woke at 9:00. Both of us woke up with backache. We walked out into a dull, grey day: no breakfast in the garden for us this morning. The weather forecast prophesied that torrential rain would begin at midday.

We spent the morning in the garden doing various small tasks. Irma decided to paint the inside of the shed door. I pulled up a load of bamboo and stinging nettles. I washed a couple of windows, and Irma explored some cupboards and threw a lot of stuff out.

In the garden in a cold wind I notice that the planting table has slowly become a part of the garden itself. It has various plants growing through it and now looks more like a set-decoration that the functioning table it started out as.

I have spent the last couple of days dipping into a book called The Great American Detective that I found in the bike shed when we returned to Helsinki last weekend. I think Tarku gave it to me several years ago. I will finish a story about Dan Turner, the Hollywood Detective, and then look online to see if I can find any other stories by Robert Leslie Bellem.

It turns out that I can. I will download a sample story from a collection available on Apple Books, on the grounds that, if I like that one as well, I will seek out the full book.

I will check the weather forecast at midday. It will prophesy that torrential rain will begin at 18:00.

We will take another full load of rubbish down to the tip at the end of the island, and find a fully functional, hardly used, deck chair which we will take.

When we get back Irma will start reading and I will start writing. The rain will start at 15:48, will last ten minutes, and will amount to no more than a slight shower.

At 16:56 it will start again. This time it will fulfill the meteorologists’ prophesies. It will pour down without pause for two hours or more, during which I will find myself trapped in the sauna house doing my writing project for a lot longer than I intended. Eventually I will hear the sound lessen, look out the window, notice a brief lull, and race back to the house.