Monday, July 7

Sunshine was incredibly restless in the night. It decided that it wanted to go out at about 2:00 and kept up a lot of banging and growling until about 3:30. It got so bad that I got up to feed it, and then it got so bad that I almost let it out. However, there really are foxes and wolves here, and I had no desire to fit bits of it round the garden in the morning.

Eventually it went to sleep and so did I. At 8:15 I had breakfast and at 8:30 I did the washing up, which meant that by 9:00 I was in the sauna house writing.

The day was very hot again – the heatwave is here – and I wrote for a couple of hours then wandered around the garden, in a repeating pattern. Wandering accomplished a few things, other than useful thinking pauses. I did one final touching-up job on the new toilet, and then I took all the paints back. I filled buckets and cleaned the house. I ate a quick lunch of saaristoleippa, boiled egg and tomatoes.

If I had been able to replace the tomatoes with anchovies I could have pretended that I was in Benitas.

Now it is 18:30. Sunshine has been wandering around the garden, and now it is lying in the sun. I am looking at it through the old sundial, which seems to be running a bit slow again. I am waiting for Irma and Naa to arrive back from Helsinki.

I have managed to write a lot today, and had time to re-read it. It seems to make sense: even more now that I have correc ted most of the spelling mistakes. I think I am a day behind on my schedule, but I could be wrong because what I have written so far makes the ending much easier to write.

With a bit of luck, then, I am still on target after all.