Saturday, June 21

Naa woke up this morning with a swollen throat, which Irma suspected was tonsilitis. Since the weather had taken several turns for the worse, and since Irma has not slept well, despite the fact that we did not get up until almost 14:00, she decided that they would drive back to Helsinki to sleep in the warm and see a doctor tomorrow.

We set a family record by sitting down to breakfast at 15:00, after which we did some necessary cleaning and changed the bedding. I also washed my hair and had a bucket bath, risking pneumonia in the fast decreasing temperature.

Midsummer is one of the times that Finns display flags and Mikael and Camilla have their’s flying in the wind. The sky is a steel grey and the wind is cold and blustery. Nobody wants to walk down to the bay to see how warm the water is.

After a dinner of Lily’s fishcakes Naa and Irma will pack up and leave. I will decide to stay with the cat because I really want to get this writing finished, and because moving the cat around seems a lot of unnecessary work. It is a cat of routines and it is firmly in summer mode now.

I will go to bed at 21:30 and Sunshine will settle down on Irma’s bed. I will go into an immediate deep sleep, as I always seem to do here, and wake up about twelve hours later dreaming that Naa and I are organising some kind of disco at some kind of international school camp. We are using usb sticks instead of records or cds and I am explaining how the console works to some earnest people from Eastern Europe.