Saturday, June 7
Vartiosaari, 15:00
I was in Kallio at 9:00 to collect ALain and his friend Frederic. Frederic has a newly broken arm, won while playing with his son, and so he has decided not to camp on the island. We got the metro to Hakaniemi, and then walked to the ferry, where we met Ulla, and another 25 or so people attending the event. The ferry took forty five minutes to get to the island and it was an interesting journey. We made one stop and I could not work out were it was.
We got off at Vartisaario and walked across the island to the unconference site. There is no hurry and I am stopping to look at the signposts. Some of them are old and part of the fabric of the island and some are new and concenred with Pixelache.
We will spend an active day in various presentations and demonstrations. Lunch will be outside and I will meet Nigel Helyer for the first time in fifteen years. I will also meet a number of other people I have met at different events around Europe over the last decade.
In the late afternoon I will walk back to the jetty where a young man will row me and several Croatian and Finnish people back to the mainland. We will land on the outskirts of Herttoniemi and I will make my way to the metro station and home.
The evening tonight will, if anything, go even less well than yesterday. Irma and I will talk past each other, except for a few moments when we are actually shouting at each other. I will, I suspect, do more of the shouting, and none of it will, strictly speaking, be necessary.
I find the way that Irma is grieving incomprehensible. Perhaps nobody ever fully understands somebody else. In misreading Irma I often manage to say the wrong thing in the wrong way at the wrong time. This is nobody’s fault but mine and I regret it.
A lot.