Essays listed alphabetically

I walk down towards the beach this morning and notice that the city bikes have arrived. Winter has definitely lost the fight now. The bikes all look fresh and clean and I pause to photograph the line.

I have no earbuds with me today. Last night I went to sleep with my head buzzing with ideas for adding to the text I have written so far. The logic all appears clear to me now, but it still needs fleshing out with examples and something that passes for sparkling prose. I no longer ask, ”Does the text exist?” Instead I have started to ask, ”How can I make it better?”

I decide to take this as a good sign and put aside any concerns that it might usefully have happened earlier.

I spent the whole morning in a Nobanet team meeting which, I confess, I was not pareticularly looking forward to, as they often move at a gentle meandering pace, leaving me thinking of all the other things I could and should be doing. This morning was interesting in several ways. Firstly we defined a future for Nobanet that revolves around e-business, and might well result in Christa, Mikke and I working together. Secondly, Mikke explained at one point how he is getting his students to teach each other, and this fits exactly into my current thinking. We arranged to meet and talk about this sometime soon.

I spent most of the afternoon in a team meeting in which we discussed radically increasing the number of students we take in without increasing the staff.

Now I am almost home. I am outside the house where snow has been falling all day. This is what I could see at exactly this time yesterday. Now I can see nothing but white and grey. The white is the snow and the grey is the slush that is being formed everytime someone steps on it.

Soon I will say hello to Sunshine and let him out into the slush. I will take the compost and get my feet soaking wet. The paths in the garden are like canals with a crispy snow topping.

I will continue planning the details of the MA course that begins on Thursday. I have decided to make it as topical as possible and I am trying to tie together news stories into a narrative that will address the subject of the course.

This time we had rehearsed, we knew what to do, and we knew how to do it. The result? We explored 17 nations in one day.

We started with Luxembourg which had the best imax surround sound immersive experience we have seen so far. Full of whooshes and mind-boggling visuals it displayed ”facts” as single lines of text that zoomed past occasionally. Who knew Luxembourg had a steel industry? Who remembers Radio Luxembourg on swinging 208?

The route through the pavilion also ended with a 21 metre slide for a minute of real-world excitement.

We finished with the raucous and rude after-dusk dancing and drumming of Angola. In between we saw enough to establish some patterns.

All countries decide whether to show or tell. In every case so far telling has proved a losing strategy. Show me a wall display saying “In the last 5 years over 270,000…” and my eyes shift elsewhere. When elsewhere shows another display saying “43 MILLION new…”, I feel an urgent need to leave the room.

Russia won today’s showing contest, with a display called The Mechanics of Wonder that focussed on a detailed breakdown of neuroscience and featured a giant floating brain and some thundering assertions.

MY SELF is my neural HYPERNETWORK: not a warehouse but a network. CONSCIOUSNESS is the traffic in this network. LEARNING IS A PROCESS OF CHANGES in neural interactions. CREATIVITY is the process of solving a new problem by CREATING A NEW pattern of CONNECTIONS. It is a spark between previously unrelated concepts.

Nothing explained why Russia wanted you to understand neuroscience but, nonetheless, that constituted everything they wanted to tell you.

Botswana had a simple, inexpensive, poetic and moving pavilion where we spent a long time. Finland’s pavilion suffered from untreatable schizophrenia.

The Mirage Oasis offered a wonderful wooden space which made everyone silent as they entered. A second such piece, a real ice hotel, for example, would have made for a genuine crowd magnet. A takeaway book of Finnish Facts would have completed the job and demonstrated both confidence and Nordic design.

In real life, however, the Mirage Oasis stood right next to a small and deeply mediocre “tell, tell, tell” exhibition that looked as though it had got thrown together at the last moment by certified dullards.

Its brevity constituted its only saving grace.

Naa stayed the night and we all got up and got ready for Tarku’s funeral. At 11:00 Timppa and Arvi arrived and we left for the crematorium, stopping in Kulasaari to collect the flowers we had ordered.

The chapel was full. Some people I recognised and many I didn’t. The last time we were here was for Auo’s funeral and the cello playing and the choice of music made me move between the present and the past as I sat there. I remembered some things that I had totally forgotten about Auo’s funeral at the same time as I remembered Tarku, and the things she had done with Auo and Naa. I noticed Jertta Roos in the congregation and suddenly felt like the narrator in A Dance to the Music of Time, and hoped we had not already arrived at the last volume hearing secret harmonies.

Now we are leaving the chapel, having said hello to a few people. The overall mood seems to be elegaic, or perhaps I am still half aware in Hietaniemi and half lost in the evocative world of Anthony Powell. I look around for Widmerpool and see Tarku’s son Immu instead.

When we arrived at the house Kalle will have overseen a very fitting tribute to her. Tarku was famous for her lengthy parties with far too much food and plenty to drink. For one final time we are sitting outside in the garden with just enough food to be far too much, and just enough wine to be plenty. It will feel strange to realise that this will almost certainly be the last time that we will be sitting here, and probably the last time we will see many of these people.

I will chat briefly with Jertta who will suggest that we should meet next at her funeral. I will promise to attend if she lets me know when it is, and hope but not say that this scene is taking place in volume ten and not later.

In the evening Irma and I will attend the opening meeting of a peer group for parents who have lost a child. As we had feared, they will all, with one exception, have lost a child during pregnancy or childbirth, or two or three days afterwards. A couple will have lost this baby ten or more years ago. Whatever their undoubted pain and suffering they have not lost a child in the same way as we, and the woman from Lovissa have. The problems and pain that they have and will deal with are very different to the ones that we have and will deal with.

We will leave with our own suffering placed into context, and feeling we learned from that; but we will also agree that we will not be going back.

Today is a public holiday: the one known to Christians as Ascension Day. The shops are no longer closed but they have slightly shorter opening hours.

The weather is now officially summery, and strikingly hot. We are in the garden, having had breakfast in the garden for the first time this year. I am looking at the flowers which have all suddenly sprung into action. I have got Naa’s bike out and I am testing the tyres on every bike I can see.

Later we will sit in the garden with the sun pouring down on us and have a summer cider: the first of the year.

I spent the morning with a focus group that I had agreed to join in a mixture of madness and sympathy before Christmas. Denice is doing research for her doctorate and she had asked every member of staff to participate. I agreed to and answered an online questionaire. This morning I am sitting in the follow-up that I hadn’t expected when I agreed. However, the same thing happened as yesterday. Someone in the group started talking about the way in which they get students to teach each other, and the importance of learning through teaching. I made a note to contact her and Micke later in the week.

In the early afternoon I started making slideshows for this week’s MA course. I was able to start this late because I intended to repurpose existing slide shows, and this was what I did.

At 15:00 I had a tutorial with a student who wants to do her thesis about the changing shape of celebrity. I showed her some material I had about the history of Photo Play, the biggest and most successful celebrity gossip magazine of the silent film era.

At 17:00 I did the actual recording of the student radio play in which I play an intolerant priest. We did as I suspected we would. Christian, the other actor, and I did take after take while the director worried about the stress on each sentence. Eventually it all went perfectly, which is to say that the noises that Christian and I made almost matched the sounds the director had in his head.

Now I have raced home because Niilia is visiting. Naa is decorating her nails and I am looking at a chest in the living room. Niilia has grown and is now tall and slim like her sisters. She was one of Auo’s closest friends and so inevitably we spend some time talking about Auo.

Later, when Niilia is being driven home, Naa will sit and watch me adjust the contrast and tones on the photograph on my iPad using a version of Photoshop – Photoshop Touch – that Adobe cancelled, presumably because it is too capable. It has been replaced with a suite of mini-apps that, even together, are not capable of everything Photoshop Touch is.

Hopefully by the time it becomes too old to work the new versions will have matured enough to regain the features that this one had two years ago.

A few weeks ago I came across the Vivaldi browser, or at least came across it again. I had first seen it several years ago and failed to find anything interesting in it. Chromium-based, it seemed to have so many options that it appeared like hard work.

Earlier this month the Vivaldi team introduced the finished version of Vivaldi Mail and Calendar. I checked them out and, to my surprise and delight, they worked very well. I ran them alongside Mailbird for ten days and now I can announce to an uncaring world that I have switched completely to Vivaldi.

One big advantage: it works happily with WebDav, so I can run my calendars from my own website, and no longer go through Google.

21.
those about to wake
dream ice puddles where mice swim
one more winter storm

22.
the mice from the shed
pad softly through the garden
hunting winter fuel

23.
a squirrel arrives
branch to branch to roof to wall
oh that box of nuts

24.
the snow falls melts falls
full with possibility
the sleeping garden

25.
evening shovels
the path and roadside are cleared
me and the russians

26.
communal the box
a mouse climbs in for dinner
the nuts are so big

27.
walking is easy
the girls think so they are wrong
my shoes just say no