Wednesday, June 25

I got up at 7:15, had breakfast quietly while Naa slept, got washed and dressed, and headed for the ferry. At 8:15 I got the bus to Borgå, and then the 9:15 870 bus to Puotila. I wandered through Prisma and Itis and then got the metro to Hakaniemi.

Here I am fifteen minutes early for my appointment with Annika, who has become my de facto therapist. The sky is grey and overcast and the square seems almost deserted. I think there where more people in Borgå market place than they are here.

I will spend almost an hour and a half with her talking about the things one talks to with one’s therapist. I find the experience of talking with someone who does not, in the Finnish expression, have their own pig in the ditch to be liberating in many ways. I can approach complex issues by saying something that I might decide that I don’t actually mean without having to then expain why I said it. I can say things that might not be true without being attacked in order to find out whether I believe they might, at some level, be true.

At 12:45 I will be in a room in Diacor having my knee examined again. Today’s diagnosis is Baker’s Cyst, and today’s medicine is tablets that I will get, via a e-prescription, at the apteeki in Itäkeskus.

At 14:30 I will be home ironing. At 15:30 I will be in the garden raking while Irma uses various gardening implements to cut, hack and mow.

At 18:30 we will be in Lidl in Borgå, and at 19:45 we will be at home. Naa will be back from work and we will share a Lidl Inferno pizza, one of the only mass-produced foodstuffs that is actually hotter than the label predicts.