Thursday, February 24

I woke to what sounded like snow sliding off a roof. When I got up I looked out of the window but could not see anything obviously new in the mountain of snow outside.

At breakfast Irma said that she had never seen so much snow in Helsinki. When I sat down to start work I read this on the YLE website:

Road maintenance crews in Helsinki have already collected and dumped 80,000 lorry loads of snow this winter, while more snow is still on the way.
During average winters, snow removal teams fill up between 40-60,000 truckloads of snow.

The current situation prompted the city’s snow removal team to figure out how to deal with the extra white stuff.

Helsinki earmarked 24 million euros for snow maintenance this winter, but that is not going to be enough, according to Pekka Isoniemi, the city’s maintenance unit chief. He said an additional four or five million euros will be needed to do the job.

I also read that Russia had begun to invade Ukraine; a move that will either conclude within days leaving the rest of the world saying “tut, tut” and turning away or, last for years, drag more and more people in, and probably change Europe for the rest of my life and longer.

At the end of the day we decide we need to leave the house or risk going mad. We head for Itis and pass through Finnmari where I spot an assortment of heads quietly watching me. They remind me of the Weeping Angels.

At Stockmann we will notice that a few more things have fallen off. They appear to have lost an optician and a toy department.

Careless.