Saturday, September 11

We have come to Prisma looking for the kind of nails we need to put some pictures on some walls.

As we walk towards the escalator I come across this display. We can watch the little girl and the elderly man both blowing into age suitable oxygen cylinders. The caption, according to my translation anyway, says Breathe more easily immediately and the four icons underneath suggest some more or less spurious reasons why this might prove necessary.

Apparently coughing, owning lungs, running, and singing can use up more oxygen than the human body can breathe in without assistance.

For some reason I cannot quite put my finger on I find it somewhere between sad and terrifying that, in the thrid decade of the twenty first century, someone has decided to offer supplies of oxygen as leisure purchases. Finland has some of the cleanest air in the world. If we need these then I shudder to think what people sell in the rest of the world.

I can remember when the idea of privatising and selling air struck people as an amusing joke, a reductio ad absurdum. Capitalism, you’ve got to love it.