Thursday, April 11

 

 

I woke at 4:00 with my mind racing. I had a downloadable stream of thoughts and I downloaded some of them immediately into Todoist’s inbox. Not all of them counted as tasks exactly, but putting them there guaranteed that I would process them in the morning.

I went back to sleep just after six and woke when the alarm went at 7:28. I left the house to a crisp, dry morning.

I read a student thesis on the bus, and then brought this diary up to date on the metro. On the second bus I discovered that Britain’s date for leaving the European Union has had another extension. They will now leave on October 31. Or not.

I spent the morning teaching the Structuring Information course, in which we might a mighty leap with javascript and built a one page website from scratch. This involved very little coding but it looked impressive.

At lunchtime I had a long conversation with Mirko. We agreed to record ll the videos for the online course again. We will do them next Monday at the speed of light. Importantly we agreed a new format that should make it all possible.

In the afternoon I carried on with the application. Fortunately the room had fallen very silent, with hardly anyone there. Writing got done.

At 17:00 I joined the Pixelache AGM online using Zoom and by 17:25 they had got the online connection just about working. I have never understood why I can have online meetings with Abhijit in Bangalore and Cathy in Brisbane with no trouble at all and yet online meetings with Pixelache seem like tasks of insurmountable difficulty. I have also never understood why everyone else in Pixelache seems to find this both acceptable and normal. The latter has always worried me more than the former.

At 18:45 Irma collected me from Arcada and we drove to Villa Hakasalmi, not far from the Opera House, to attend an event called Nordic Match. We left at the earliest opportunity.

As we leave I stand in front of the old house and photograph it. According to the website:

The charming Villa Hakasalmi is located next to Finlandia Hall near Töölönlahti bay. This elegant building retains a tangible sense of the Empire style era and is one of the few of its kind remaining in Helsinki. The best-known resident of Villa Hakasalmi was Aurora Karamzin (1808–1902), who lived there until her death. Because of this, the building is also referred to as the Karamzin Villa.

Aurora, née Stjernvall, was a celebrated Helsinki beauty who was expected to marry into a good family. However, her life was decided when she moved to Saint Petersburg to become an imperial lady-in-waiting. There, she immersed herself into high society and married the extremely wealthy Paul Demidov in 1836 at the imperial family’s request.

Irma learned some exceedingly odd and disturbing news today of the plotting in the family kind and we will spend the evening turning it over in our minds.

We will go to bed in an unclear state of mind. I will lay awake for some time before sleep takes me mid-thought.