Sunday, July 15

 

 

We got up at 10:00 and ate breakfast outside. The weather services confirmed that we have the hottest day so far, and that the heat wave has arrived earlier than expected.

We had planned on spending the day in Borgå tomorrow, but Sunshine has worms and needs medicine, so we decide to go to Borgå today instead. The AC in the car has started working intermittently and we sit sweating until Irma hits a bump in the road and it switches itself off. Apparently it works on bumps, which leads me to suspect that it has a loose connection somewhere.

We started at Mikrokulma looking for car oil which we actually found twenty minutes later in Tokmanni.

We park in the centre by Borgå bus station and walk to the Apteeki where we get some new super powerful worm tablets for the cat. We then walk towards the Old Town. We walk up one street looking in various shops, most of which sell exactly what they sold last year. We get to the market square where Irma looks at clothes and I wander around taking photographs. I take a photograph of a grating that a child has partly hand coloured. An adult has subsequently dropped a single cigarette butt onto it.

After purchasing some clothes we will walk down to Brunberg and then to Sokos, which has a sale.

We will finish the afternoon by sitting on a bench by the bus station watching a live stream of a demonstration in Helsinki. About 1200 people demonstrate against Trump or Putin or both, while another 400 people demonstrate against the demonstrators. Two topless rappers provide political entertainment before Sofi Oksanen gives a speech that details her rather idiosyncratic view of the way that “Finlandisation” has continued quietly.

We will drive home with the air conditioning still working and eat fish for dinner.

We will experiment with a drink we have called Toovey. We have based this on two cans of Vodka and Vichy water that we bought from Lidl. The can had 5.5% alcohol and had none of the sugar or artificial flavours associated with ciders or lonkero. We will empty 25cl from a 1.5 litre bottle of Vichy water, top it up with Koskenkorvu, and then drink it slowly. We will agree that we prefer it to lonkero.

We will watch the World Cup final in which France will beat Coatia 4-2. We will learn that the temperature has officially reached 32 degrees.

We will go to swim and discover that the algae has arrived. The water will look like soup and no swimming will happen. We will curse and walk back to the house. This means that we will not swim during the heatwave.

Arrrgh!