Wednesday, June 19

I made up my mind about something as I lay in bed this morning. I had woken up about thirty five minutes early and started thinking about what I had to do today. I leaned over and checked Todoist on my phone and realised that I would find myself doing one thing for most of the day. At midsummer this changes, I thought, before I put the phone down, and rolled over to doze for half an hour.

It has become normal to wake up in bright sunshine and leave the house in t-shirt and shorts. Every morning, as I do, I remember that this might change at any moment in the precarious Finnish summer.

I got to Puotila and left my bike, noticing that the number of cycles has diminished day by day this week, as people begin to leave the city for summer. I counted five bikes today as I locked mine.

I spent most of the day going through the student assignments for the Interactive Storytelling. I had already gone through the final assignments, and made a spreadsheet listing the students and the teams that they had formed. I now went through every discussion group and counted and weighed the contributions that each student had made. I went through the assignments and then checked my emails to make certain that I had not made any specific agreements with ill students that I now needed to take into account.

By 15:30 I had entered all the course grades in ASTA, and I checked all that off in Todoist. I then went to the library in Arabianranta to collect three cds that had arrived for me, all by The Divine Comedy.

I leave the library with the cds in my rucksack and walk over the road to the bus stop. I notice three gigantic plant pots standing in front of the metal sculpture. The bus will not arrive for five minutes so I walk over and photograph them. Summer in the city, I think, as I almost get knocked down by a cyclist who watches her phone more than the road ahead.

I will get home to meet Sunshine lying in the sun outside the door. I will then spend ninety minutes recording two podcast episodes with Sophie. Henry will make energetic noises throughout the recording and I will marvel at the amount of editing that these episodes will require. Fortunately I will do them next week in Sundö while Irma works in Helsinki, so I will have no interruptions, except for ones I make myself.

Irma will arrive home from a meeting with young people at about 20:00 and cycle off to take some recyclable cartons to the collection bins. I will read a novel by Earl Stanley Gardner, writing as AA Fair, starring Bertha Cool and Donald Lam.

Better than Perry Mason, I will say.