Onward!!

Google opened Street View for Finland today. While the Finnish press is going on about the privacy implications that have been rehashed with every new launch of the service in a new country, as well as asking readers to find “sensational” or “funny” scenes captured by the camera vehicles, I’ve been spending time feeling painfully homesick for the place.

The company has photographed large swathes of the country in springtime and early summer, and I think that’s significant. Seeing delicate birch leaves framing slivers of brilliant blue water on a sunny day just makes me ache for an ice cream cone and a walk down the seaside. In a way it’s creating a mental image that never quite existed, a desire for an amalgamation of all the perfect days I’ve spent there. Still, I’d take an imperfect one too, if I could fast-forward time a few months to, say, early June and get a flight ticket to boot.

Interestingly, the places that have strong memories attached but I haven’t visited for a long time gave me the biggest kicks. Thus, seeing my childhood house was no big deal, as I was there only a month or so ago. Seeing my ex-girlfriend’s place, though, triggered a longing for her mother’s cooking, the shelves of the local library (what the hell?) and the smell of raindrops hitting the dirt track I used to walk next to the train tracks to the nearby station. Oh, and barbecues at the allotment, shopping for a sneaky and (barely-afforded) six-pack of beer for an evening with friends, and a thousand other memories I never hope to lose.

Pirkka Aunola writes about experiencing a similar feeling, and notes the power that completely unposed, “neutral” scenes can have. I can agree 100%.

I’ve been back in London mere hours, and I’m finding myself missing Finland a lot. Somehow it being really cold and really wintery, completely different from London, made it that much more attractive. London seems dimmed and grey, even bleak, compared to the strict monochrome of Finland where, even in the silver moonlight, there was mostly just black and pure white. While walls grow with Ivy here, they’re subdued in their green in a way that is hard to describe exactly. It’s ironic, there being more colour around here.

I’m due back at work tomorrow, and I think I’ll have an early night. My body is, after all, two hours ahead, or at least something that is not GMT. Thanks to everyone that made this break really good and met up with me, and apologies to those I didn’t get to catch up with. I’ll definitely try to be back as soon as resources allow.

I never used to be into winter weather. When people in the UK ask me what Finland is like in the winter, my first response has often been “awfully cold”. But now, when all of Finland is blanketed by snow and gripped by proper frost, I’m really happy about it. Though the nights are long and dark, the full moon and stars shining off snow make walking around at night magical. Visiting a friend’s house last night, we discovered that before parking the car we had to take shovels and clear the driveway of 40cm of snow. It made getting into the warm house even more rewarding.

Walking the dog this morning, in the stillness of fifteen degrees below zero, all this came to me. What’s changed to make me feel so excited at the prospect of a good few hours trudging through snow, or to wish for a good, clear, cold night for New Year’s? A share of it must be proper equipment and a feeling that putting on that extra pair of thick socks doesn’t take any more time or effort. Another part must be down to feeling a need to appreciate nature, even in this petrified and still state, livign among the urban pulse of London most of the time. And of course, having a mere four hours of proper daylight, you get a feeling of wanting to make the most of it.

And then, of course, getting old. Has to be.

A year ago I was gearing up to spend the Christmas holidays in Peru, on the other side of the world. It was a lovely experience, and I loved discovering things about the country and its fascinating culture. But this year, gearing up to go back to Finland for the first time since April, I am feeling extremely expectant and nostalgic at the same time. It’s like I feel like my year should end in certain surroundings, in the biting cold of sub-Arctic air, in the enveloping darkness driven away in pockets by light streaming from windows and cast down by streetlights. It’s a largely monochrome world, except where filled with colour by human activity.

London is dark too, but not in the same way. I keep thinking to the last several years aside from 2008 when I’ve spent the holiday in the house I learned to think of as my childhood home, messing about with my brother and sets of old video games and things. The smallness helps, the familiarity and the feeling that upon my arrival everything is as I left it. So much changes in my life, and there too, but enough stays the same for me to consider it home, I guess. I don’t think of many places in my life like that.

The last week and a bit (and next week too) have really been rather extreme with engagements. I’ve had work parties to go to and still have to make an appearance at one, and have met some lovely-seeming people at Christmas-themed house parties. I also did an absolutely outrageous thing with some friends and spent 15 hours in Paris seeing Rammstein for the hell of it, before doing my day at work the next day, feeling only mildly out of it. Despite of how much fun it has been, I really feel like it’s time to take a breather, some time out and just relax. Read a book. Play something silly on a computer. Listen to, I don’t know, some jazz or something.

I’d love to add “start living healthily” but that’ll have to wait until the inevitable and thoroughly expected home-cooked Christmas food is out of the way. I really was inspired today, at a party where most people were either serious about their Kung Fu or Capoeira. I don’t know if I’ll be trying either (though I was being thoroughly persuaded by an Italian girl who actually trains at the LSE) but I’ll definitely be doing something come the new year. So I guess that’s my promise, clichéd as it may be.

Until then, I’ll be obsessively checking weather forecasts and looking at silly things like weather cameras like the picture above, which allow me to live the diving temperatures from a distance, and reminisce about childhood car journeys taken in the night, with the yellow streetlights sweeping rhythmically over the car. In other words, I’ll be missing home.

A friend of mine, who is at Glastonbury festival, received her university results today through her friend who is in London and checked the notice board that results for their university are posted on. She texted me “A first. I’m shaking.”

I wonder how I’ll feel come results day (the 14th). I have this vague inkling that I have done rather okay and will end up with a first myself, but on the other hand it really does teeter on such a fine line. Up until then things seem to hang in a balance, a kind of limbo where little happens. Of course, I am applying to jobs (though not as madly as the friend mentioned above) but it seems I’m only now recovering from the past term, two weeks on. I’m going to spend a week in Spain thanks to some rather amazing friends (and cheap-as-chips Ryanair flights which I admittedly have not yet secured the funds or paid for) which will be very, very welcome. Sun, pool, grill and chill. What could be better? Maybe then I’ll have a clearer head upon coming back, because I feel being in this limbo isn’t the most productive state of being.

Though I am sincerely looking forward to the break (and I feel I deserve it), I can’t help thinking how beautiful summer back in Finland is. It would be wonderful to get some of that, too, but you can’t have everything. For some reason I’ve been feeling like doing things with my hands, which is as inexplicable as it is new. Mucking about at the family summer cottage would give an opportunity to do a bit of that, though, if only in the form of chopping wood and some general maintenance.