Saturday, January 13

 

 

We all got up late, to nobody’s surprise. We had brunch, got in the car and left.

We drove to see Marja and to collect the cat. Everything seemed completely gray and colourless. Partly this resulted from us coming back from bright sunlight; but we could also see that the sky genuinely held nothing but gray clouds.

We met Jens and his girlfriend Mikaela when we arrived, and Kim and his girlfriend Daria arrived from upstairs a little later. Sunshine lay on a bed, taking very little notice of anything, while Vanessa and Mikaela’s son pretended to play with him. We stayed for an hour or so chatting, and then headed back to Helsinki with a very quiet cat.

Almost home, we stop at Alepa because Irma wants to buy something to eat. She disappears and Naa and I sit in the car looking at the view. Eventually I photograph it because the light seems so unusual. By Monday, of course, everything will have returned to normal, and I will expect nothing more than this.

We will eat fish fingers and chips and then Irma will take Naa home. She will take a suitcase full of stuff with her: shoes, clothes, food, and cosmetics. When Irma returns we will have TV problems. We will receive some channels as usual, but none of the mainstream channels. We will deal with this by watching a complete and lengthy episode of Law & Order on Fox.

We will get our mail from Minna, who has emptied our postbox while we holidayed. It will contain my cd of Pete Wylie’s new crowd-funded album Pete Sounds. I like it, even though it might contain rather too many straight up love songs addressed to his new wife.

Sunshine will spend the evening trying to get out of the house until he finally settles down exactly where he usually does.

We will sample the wine we brought from Dubai while doing this. Irma had bought a bottle of sparkling wine for no reason other than the completely gold bottle. It will prove a perfectly acceptable prosecco.

We will not stay up late.