Thursday, January 1

Naa phoned about half past midnight and Irma drove to collect her from Itäkeskus. They got home about fifteen minutes later and we stood in the dark garden and lit the remaining firework to celebrate the start of 2015.

I am using my iPad Air to take the daily photograph for the first time, and it seems to be doing better in these circumstances than the phone ever has. Naa is explaining that it was “alright” at Senate Square. She is glad she went to see it once, but she will find something else to do next year.

We will get up late for the first brunch of the year. I will then settle down to experiment with WordPress, the WP media library and my iPad. I am under the impression that I should be able to switch to using the media library for all my images, and that (with a bit of careful preparation) this will enable me to write posts from the iPad without needing to use my laptop to process, resize and upload the images.

By 14:00 I will be convinced that this is the case. I will also be convinced that the preparations will need to be very careful indeed. The iPad is very reluctant to rename images, which is a vital part of the process, and one that ought to be very simple. I will resolve to set up a separate test site just to finalise a workflow that allows me to take images and then load them from the WordPress app directly into the media library of my site.

While this is going on Irma will receive a completed unexpected and somewhat shocking message which will make us think that we are living in The Bold and the Beautiful.

At 14:40 Irma will drive Naa to Itäkeskus where she is going to meet Jennifer and go to the centre to see a movie. Just as she leaves I will have the desktop version of my new image system working, with all the new functions in place.

Later, because its the start of a new year, because Auo is clearly not with us, and because of things that are happening to people that we know, we will find ourselves talking about relationships and the many ways in which the future and the past are illusory. Any plans for the future are, in ways we often choose to ignore, pure speculation and nothing more. “If only” something had turned out differently is just a way of speculating backwards. We can only ever deal with what we have now and hope that the way we deal with it prepares us for the unexpected moment when the trapdoor opens beneath our feet.