Onward!!

It’s hard to describe just how full of light and fragrant and sweet and beautiful this time of summer in Southern Finland is. Well past 11pm there’s enough light to do anything outside by, and thanks to a scorching hot day you can hardly feel the tongues of cold creeping in at night-time. I took the longer route home from town, walking past a stretch of forest we used to play in as kids, through the quiet yard paths we used to cycle through, past windows both lit from the inside and dark, past rows of mailboxes and into a quiet house.

I can’t quite place it, but it’s definitely true. Somehow the light in Finland is just that much more intense than in London. Colours are more thoroughly there,  everything is that much more clearly in focus. I can’t really explain it in any other way except that it seems everything in the UK seems covered by dust that you can’t wash out. Strange.

I’ve spent the last two days ramming through a long-overdue project, namely my permanent driver’s licence. Legally required, you couldn’t fail the two-day thing which was just designed to drive home some best practice points, but I still had nerves. It really couldn’t have been more if it tried. Driving down brilliantly sunny Helsinki streets with mournfully sad schlager pouring out the radio, I was supervised by a hulk of a man. Bald, in his fifties, wearing jeans and sandals showing his manky toenails. With one slightly drooping eye he spoke in a slow, staccato rhythm I couldn’t quite place as Helsinki or not. Instead of doing two laps around the same route and comparing mileage and driving choices before and after instruction, he simply tapped around on the center console showing me the 6.9 liters/100 km (34 mpg) reading. Apparently that was decent for the car and how I was driving. So that was that.

The second day consisted of driving at a track made intentionally slippery. I’d recommend that day (aside from the price) to anyone in a heartbeat. A gloriously sunny day, splashing around on wet track skidding and righting your car again in safe conditions was both fun and genuinely useful. In fact, I wish I could have had a few more goes trying to right myself from a skid in a curve, with the hypothetical truck coming on the opposite lane. We got instructions for each run via radio and then individual feedback.

After all the fun they really brought the house down by taking us to a wreck museum, showing the damage caused both to cars and to passengers in several different types of accidents including crashing headlong into a moose. I was one of the “lucky” 5 who climbed into a car that was then flipped around on its roof (slowly) and we had to climb out. It was disorienting to say the least, and I can’t begin to imagine how rough it would be in the confusion, pain and fright that happens in a real, instantaneous crash.

At least I’m a lot more confident in driving in the States now. We’ll see how long that lasts.

I have realized that despite reading through at least the front-page headlines of Finnish newspaper websites regularly, I have lost touch with what is going on in the country. I’m going there at the end of the week for a bit to escape both London and to burn through the holiday I’ve got to have before the end of my job contract, and am trying to get into the mindset.

The prime minister has resigned, apparently, to be succeeded by a woman. Throughout the year there have been news about party funding irregularities. Other than that things seem to be the same as ever in politics. I can’t begin to say much of anything about any other aspect of life, except maybe silly entertainment news tidbits that flow in one ear and out the other.

I guess I should listen to the radio news more often or something.

I certainly seem to.

The endless rows of fried chicken shops littering London’s streets are clearly getting to me, so it’s a good thing I’m getting away for a bit permitting that flying tin cans don’t fall out of the sky. I don’t think I’ve ever had quite this much flying planned for the next month. I feel like a bit of an environmental criminal but on the other hand I’m going a bit ropey in this city. It’s made all the more interesting because my job situation for later this year is all still up in the air, with me hopefully finding out more today or tomorrow, Tuesday.

I’ll be in Rome for the coming weekend, which means a four-day work week both this week and the next. And the one after that, too, given that I’m flying back to Finland for midsummer. Getting away from it all for a bit never hurt anyone, least of all with at least some Finnish blood flowing through their veins.

Once I get back I will wrap up my job and leave for my trip across the Atlantic. All very exciting, all very confusing.

Walking home from the tube station after a raucous gig at The Comedy Store, past the family herding two kids to stay on the path and not stray onto the grass, past the shutting takeaway shop, through the quiet street with a fox running in between two houses, I realise I know this smell. It’s heady, and sweet, and tender.

It smells like summer.

The air is slightly chill along my arms and cheeks as I pound the pavement, rounding more corners. But it’s pleasant, invigorating, fresh.

I’ll be back in Finland in two months. No doubt it’ll feel similar then, like those nights as a kid I’d end up leaving a friend’s place way too late into the night, when the sun was far beyond the tree-covered horizon and casting only a faint Midnight glow. I’d bike along deserted streets, looking up at the pine and spruce trees standing quietly, unwaveringly, black against the dark-blue sky above. The smell of lilacs and kicked-up gravel dust, and the tender new leaves exhaling.

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%.