Sunday, August 31

Today we got up very late indeed, and Naa could hardly stand. This year she ran the Midnight Run with no training and no practice at all. She literally turned up and ran. She limped around the house complaining that every muscle in her body hurt and her legs didn’t work.

At 16:00 we set off for the centre. A couple of days ago Irma had found a message in Facebook about a concert this evening called We Agree To Disagree, a kind of classical music peace demo. She got us tickets and here we go.

The concert has been arranged from scratch in three or four days as a response to the increasing tension in Finland over the now-regular Russian incursions into Finnish airspace and the build-up of troops near the border. There is an extraordinary collection of international musicians, including Barbara Hendriks.

The concert starts at 17:00, but the scheduling is over-ambitious and it starts over-running almost as soon as it starts. Two minute introductions take ten minutes, as people feel a need to state their position. Perhaps the most eloquent, apart from Barbara Hendriks whose blues performance with Ulf Englund is a contiuous and powerful political statement, is Lisa Batiashvili, the Estonian violinist and conductor.

So much of the show makes me think of Auo. She loved the opera we went to last autumn, and I can imagine her questions about this show: about the cellos, and the composers, and about Kimo Phjonen’s accordion. I can also, all too easily, imagine her delight and enthusiasm at what we are seeing.

The show includes a wonderfully random selection of music that you would never normally find on the same bill, and we are all loving it. Unfortunately the second interval coincides with our realisation that we are all very hungry, having had nothing since brunch, and that Naa needs to go to bed. We leave reluctantly, although I will later watch some of the live stream of the suite from West Side Story, which finishes the evening off with lots of drums and percussion.

Yesterday, Irma was given a lot of food to bring home from the Gambian party, and we will have that for dinner. The spiced chicken and rice will be fantastic and the starters that look like Spring Rolls but aren’t will be even better.

I will go to bed and be asleep within seconds.