Friday, July 27

 

 

For reasons I cannot explain, I woke up humming a song in my head and trying to work the name of the song. I lay there with my eyes closed until I called out to myself: The Rose! I had had the title song of a movie I have not seen for at least a decade running through my head. Then I remembered: a vinyl copy of the soundtrack album sits in a case in the kitchen here, under the record player we bought last year.

I got up at 8:30 wanting to hear it. Irma and Sunshine slept soundly so I crept out to wash, play with the new version of Scrivener, and write.

While looking out the window I saw teenage girls working in the fields, picking vegetables for the market tomorrow. It occurred to me that, had things turned out differently (had things turned out more normally), Auo would have a leading role in the field. By now she would have more experience than any of the other girls and, given the way that she behaved, she would have moved into a leading role in the girl gang. Thinking this, it occurred to me that, as part of this, Auo would almost certainly have made strenuous efforts to get somebody to teach her to drive something.

Literally two or three minutes after this thought passed through my mind, I noticed Lily (who worked with Auo in the fields for the last one or two summers of her life) racing past driving a quad-bike and towing a trailer. “Yes, like that”, I thought, and stopped everything for a few moments, as a whole raft of feelings sailed through me, one after the other.

At breakfast we decided that we did not particularly feel any need to go to Lovissa, but we did have things that we wanted to do in Borgå. We left on the 12:15 ferry. This ferry doesn’t exist, because the ferry should have a pause from 12:10 to 12:30 but several trucks waited at Tirmo and the driver decided to fetch them without pausing.

We started by visiting Honkari, as we have learned to call Hong Kong to see if they had an inflatable surfboard, which they did. We reserved it and then went to Mikrokulma to compare prices and specifications. Since Mikrokulma had completely sold out, Honkari became the clear winner.

We decided to stay for a buffet lunch at An Ngon, the Vietnamese restaurant that sits inside Mikrokulma. Either we both ate far too much, or we both ate the wrong things, because we both began to feel odd right there in the stomach area, as Gorilla Monsoon might once have said.

As we leave the building I photograph a Ford Hotrod that I see parked outside. I manage to get a photograph without too much clutter and, just as I have taken it, a car pulls into the next space neatly rendering a subsequent photograph impossible. The engine has every moving part chromed and I speculate that the driver must polish the engine again every time the car stops. I wander around it and convince myself that the car “is real”; by which I mean that it has been customised from an original 1930’s Ford and not built as a replica.

We will go back to Honkari and purchase our surfboard for when Naa comes next week. We will pop into a car showroom to look at a bright blue Volvo SUV, before deciding that we neither need it, nor want to spend our savings buying it.

After a pause at the gas station – because Irma has started feeling ill – we will walk around the new shopping street and peek into Factory Fest, the new pop festival that seems to have no customers. We will also look at some absurd sales, where we find absurd clothing bargains (four pairs of trousers for the price of one, for example).

I will buy four pairs of trousers. I will also stop at S-Market to use the toilet as I join Irma in the exciting new feeling ill craze.

The evening will contain a major event: a special eclipse of the moon that only occurs every million years, or something similar. The moon will turn red. We will duly sit outside as dusk approaches to watch it. The sky, cloudless for a week or more, will fill up with clouds and a wind will arrive from nowhere. The clouds will completely block the eclipse all over Finland, and the weather will change.