Sunday, August 5

 

 

I got up at 9:10 and walked into a perfectly dry morning. I sat and wrote for an hour until Irma arrived to say hello. At 10:20 rain started: torrential rain that bounced straight off the hard ground.

The rain lasted almost exactly ten minutes and then stopped as suddenly as it had begun.

Irma did some random painting to use up some paint at the bottom of a tin. I borrowed a step-ladder from Mika and spent a couple of hours trimming three maple trees.

As I return the ladder I pass a man painting under a tree. It looks rather like a nineteenth century painting of the artist at work. I recognise the artist as Maria von Borndorff’s father, but decide not to say anything because he seems so deep in his own world.

I do, however, return a few minutes later to take a photograph from a distance. He sits under the shade of the tree like a figure in a Constable landscape.

Irma will switch her attention to mowing. I will finish the John Bingham book, Five Roundabouts to Heaven. I will decide that I both admire and like it. It has a realism that most crime novels fail to achieve.

Shortly after this Irma will decide to go swimming and Naa and I will go with her. We will watch the painters gathered together again on Camilla’s front steps for a break.

We will get the 17:30 ferry to Tirmo so that Naa can meet Aurora and get the bus to Helsinki with her.

The temperature will drop drastically and I will want slippers in the house for the first time in weeks. We will have more rain, although only for another short burst. The wind will rise again, though, and remain in place all evening.

I will start and finish a Nero Wolfe novel, If Death Ever Slept. Rex Stout manages to create a more or less unique atmosphere, and I always find them quick, fun reading.

This will feel like one of the better ones.