Saturday, February 3

 

 

I started the day with an hour’s walk on snow that felt crisp and not at all slippery. I cranked myself up with Bootsy Collin’s album from last summer World Wide Funk. I liked it then, when I first heard it, and I liked it now as a snow soundtrack.

After brunch we set about our Saturday cleaning rituals. Every week I get surprised all over again by how much dust and cat fur collects into little tumbleweeds and rolls around the floor. Every week I wipe and brush and vacuum clean and every week it all reappears. One day I will surprise myself by not getting surprised.

Sunshine has gone in and out. Now I have made paths around the garden he has enough places to go without getting into snow up to his head. He still doesn’t like the cold at all and so now, after going out again he lolls on the radiator and warms up. Moonshine used to lay on the white stool. Sunshine overflows it and has taken to using it to make himself comfortable on the radiator. He likes to lie there and look out of the window; monitoring his territory without the bother of actually going outside.

Irma and I will have an Instagram discussion because neither of us can work out exactly how the following and sharing works. Mechanically we understand: we know what the buttons in the app do when you press them. We cannot work out why some people have hundreds of followers while posting photographs of no interest and others (including us) have relatively few followers while producing an unceasing stream of fine art. Irma has started monitoring her feed intently and experimenting with tags and mentions to see what happens. I eagerly await a report.

Irma will leave to buy fish and Naa will arrive. Time will pass and we will get a delicious uunikala. Naa will ask lots of questions about the details of her bank loan, and Irma will explain. Naa will look at the box of our Chromecast and point out that we have three month’s free subscription to Viaplay. We had not noticed this. She will check online and confirm that Viaplay has at least two films that Irma wants to see.

We will decide to set it up next week and see if we can waste the entire weekend.

Naa will leave for home, where Sampo will arrive shortly, and we will alternate between talking and watching nothing much on television.