Wednesday, February 27

On the tram I remembered that I had run out of crispbread – nakkileipä in Finnish – and walked from the tram, through the mall, and down to Lidl. While there I also bought bananas, tomatoes, and two vegan jogurts. As I walked to Arcada I could feel self-righteousness emanating from me like steam.

I cooled off, got to work, and set about finding my way through my task list. I began by noting that “Buy crispbread” had not appeared on it, which it should have done. I then switched to what did appear on the list for today and began emailing people. I also booked a room for today’s podcasting session – something I had definitely not remembered on the tram, and which I would otherwise have forgotten to do.

The podcasting session began at 11:00 and Sophie and I talked with Francois Matarasso about his new book A Restless Art, which I read last week and genuinely thought excellent. We ended up talking for almost an hour, or two episodes as I have learned to think about it. That suited us perfectly, because I now have enough material to completely cover the two weeks that Irma and I will spend in India in March.

Sophie had Henry on her knee for most of the recording which meant that she said a lot less than usual and Henry made loud interjections from time to time.

After a lunch involving crispbread, tomatoes, and vegan yogurt, I had a thesis tutorial with a third year student who wants to plan ahead. She has decided to write a thesis about how ideas spread, using meme theory as the theoretical basis of her argument. I encouraged her, and gave her as many pointers as I could while harbouring some scepticism on the grounds that the project sounds as though it could very easily spiral out of control and turn out to cover everything in the known universe.

I agreed to supervise her, though, so I suppose that my job will include keeping the balloon from expanding too much and bursting.

After this, I decided to rearrange my week and get straight on with editing the podcast episodes. By the time I left for home I had edited the first episode and laid the second one out ready for editing on Friday.

As I get off the bus and walk towards the traffic lights I notice a police van blocking the road to prevent anyone else slamming into the back of the car that has slammed into the back of the car in front. I turn to look at the remaining piles of snow and see an abstract set of black and white patterns with some colour from the street lights. Not necessarily the colour I would expect, though.

I photograph it and walk forward to see how much damage the cars have. Nobody has got hurt, but both of the cars will definitely need towing away, and the one with the crumpled front end will probably prove beyond repair.

Irma will arrive home without having seen Marja, because Jens and Mikaela had gone there and Marja had said that that counted as enough for today.