Monday, January 06, 2025

2024: the year of song, struggle and Spanish tales

2024 was the year I only just dragged my business through another crisis year, launched my skills on a foreign market, started training my mind for new trade. 

I found a new gym and a real choir - and found my voice, after decades of silence. I took up volleyball again, against better judgment and wobbly knees. I gave up cheese and took strict control over my money.

The winter was six months long and everyone important to me seemed to suffer from serious illness. There was constant struggle and worry for a 90-year-old with broken bones, dementia and loneliness. She didn't really feel like my mother anymore. The spring was a bit easier, summer peaceful. Work and money ran out in the autumn, bringing stress along with new challenges and a new direction.

It was the year I read 137 books and (according to Spotify) listened to royalcore concert band classical and academic strut pop, once for a whole day straight. I rediscovered my love for the Swedish language.

Highlights:

* New Year with friends, pizza and prosecco.

* Graffiti art exibition in an abandoned warehouse in freezing cold - a ghost town and fairytale in one. The kind of art I enjoy. Wandered around wearing double-layer wool and winter boots. Spooky funfair games, broken dolls, fairy lights in discarded boots, monsters, urinals and everything spray-painted.

* Joining a choir, a version of the one I lived in and loved 30 years ago. Loved this one too. Good for the soul and the soul voice.

* Funeral of a beloved aunt, among many other beloved aunts and uncles. My sister and I attended, feeling newly orphaned. The old and wise took us in, embraced us in their love. A church with ancient avenging angels in the ceiling, coffee in venerable poet Topelius' home.

* Age signs: christening of my second grand-niece, laser treatment of my eye, my first ever permanent medication.

* Helsinki weekend with friends, wine, Finnish pentecostals, great food, a twilight walk in icy Eira, the National Library, hunt for the most atmospheric café.

* "Rainbow mass" that I attended out of curiosity.

* Last evening in the town's only (almost) real Irish pub before it closed for renovation. Joyful dancing with a friend, meaningful conversation with my brother.

* Deepening crisis in the garment industry, losing customers and suppliers, not amenably.

* Discovery, by my dentist, of my first ever tooth cavity since the late Eighties.

* Choir weekend with hundreds of singers, two fun concerts and an unexpected icecream break in the snow.

* Sand from the Sahara that rained down on my car.

* Trip to Larsmo to look at a boat and a spring flood. Played a car game that involved heavy accents and collision avoidance.

* South African evening with rusk, lots of interesting facts and the sales price of giraffes.

* Trip of the year, a week in Spain: the Alhambra, tapas, history, sun, swifts and oranges, and a decadent life.

* Birthday: a gorgeous Andalusian dawn with both sun and moon, a champagne party on a plane with a view over Atlantic sand dunes, a good friend and Washington Irving's fairytales, a dinner eaten standing up on a train going 170 kph.

* My first book fair: history, crime fiction, fantasy, and recruiting a published author to our book club.

* Two funerals in one day, involving many tears and the bishop of Burma.

* Dinner with cousins, aunts and uncles - lots of love, home and belonging. Much needed.

* Barbecue and angling lessons on a summer's eve. The fish didn't bite, fortunately.

* Picnics and brunches with praying women, easing this year's feelings of loneliness.

* Massive air show with fighter jets, tanker aircraft and serious-looking helicopters. None of them crashed, despite their complicated maneuvers and my predictions, but I was almost killed by the shuttle bus to the car park.

* Luxury brunch with best friend, under some stuffed deer heads. It started with mimosas and ended with a chocolate fountain.

* Midsummer with the Midsummer people, some old-new additions and a very pregnant cat. Sometimes it's a wonderful feeling to be surrounded by people who all went to the same school at the same time and know the same things.

* Various road trips with mother - a favourite pastime for us both. (I made it my summer project to visit as many summer cafés as possible.) Other trips, with various people, saw Kaskö and the famous greenhouse restaurant, Kokkola and a summer yardsale in the idyllic old town, and phenomena such as old church ladies, honeybeer and the only British warship ever lost to the enemy (i.e. the Finns, who probably were as surprised by this as the Brits).

* Bubbles, good food and sangria nightlife by the seafront, with my industrial cohorts K & K.

* Guided cemetery tours: this summer's educational project (alongside reading Leo Tolstoy's shortest novel, very short indeed). Learned, among many other things, that ghosts of musicians like to play Mozart's "Sleigh Ride" and that my home town has many interesting characters.

* A day spent sipping various drinks at various sidewalk cafés with various people - perfection!

* The Olympics in Paris: watching weird sports on a laptop in the wilderness cottage.

* Night of the Arts: a viking ship, tacos, secret orders, rich red wine and the usual magnificent chaos.

* Unusual nature observations: two hares in a boxing match, a baby cuckoo, egrets.

* Close encounter with a venomous snake: almost picked it up with my bare hands. Not on purpose.

* A fight lost against AI (bad AI-generated subtitling): also lost a lot of work, and a lot of work motivation, as a result.

* Fourth funeral of the year, this time finding family love among my mother's cousins.

* Dramatic end to the summer cottage season: after a long, lonely but wonderful summer, I came home in September by bus, my car by tow truck. I decided then that summer was definitely over.

* Mental trainer course: new career I suddenly decided to embark on, maybe. Fascinating subject, weekends with fascinating people, a lot of soul searching.

* Rock gig at the jazz club.

* Exploration of the very small town of Vörå - a mountain, fake Roman ruins, runes.

* A garage roof project I was called in to help with: complicated and kind of fun, with teenagers and single ladies and a darkening evening.

* Battle against cholesterol and against doctors who disagreed about my cholesterol. 

* Battle against subtitling software, extremely demoralizing.

* Tampere weekend with sister: cafés, chasing famous donuts, a museum, Indian food, cozy evenings with cozy crime series, pear truffles from the best chocolate shop in the world.

* African birthday celebration in a blizzard, with power cuts and a pro cake.

* Software license, extremely expensive, bought from a nice Danish lady to kickstart my new career as a subtitler for Swedish TV.

* A night in a horror movie setting: me and a friend all alone in an unstaffed hotel, in the middle of nowhere, in a blizzard. I slept peacefully.

* Volunteering for a charity project: taking food and Christmas presents to suffering families, receiving beautiful smiles in return. Also found my way blocked by a gigantic horse.

* Christmas days: family celebration of the coziest kind, a dinner with former Afghan missionaries and TV producers, a brunch with firefighters and bohemians, and a trip to the last outpost on the Ostrobothnian plains where an eerie purple light shines over snow and traditional hymns are combined with mulled wine around a fire pit.

* New Year's Eve: my sister, a church service, a water/fire show and (the best part) a café. At midnight, I watched the fireworks alone and cried. 

A difficult year is over.

Sunday, December 22, 2024

silk shirt, December mood

Weary eyes, a desk lamp, a warm pool of light over scribbled notes and rebellious laptops. 

A niche in a rock face overlooking the icy sea, battered by winds, rain or snow. Dark outside when I get up to work, dark again before I've finished. 

Black jeans, silk shirt, December mood.

Saturday, November 16, 2024

items to add to the encyclopedia of me

I take messy notes in tiny hand-writing. I have a lot of imagination. I carry around bread in my pocket. I am unique.

Saturday, October 12, 2024

breathing exercises and maple leaves

October rains, colours, turbulence. 

I alternate between money trouble, breathing exercises, a class room, hypochondria, too much work, not enough work, panic, peace of mind. 

There is not enough time to savour the blood-red-to-sunny-yellow maple leaves and the swooping, chattering jackdaws.

Friday, October 11, 2024

study slowly, soothingly

Education these days is modern and high-tech, I said to myself and brought my best laptop to class. 

None of the other students did. The teacher distributed notebooks and pens. To learn a piece of information, she told us, you have to ponder it actively for at least 30 seconds - preferably by writing it down, talking about it and practicing it. 

Hence the slow pace and the note-taking by hand, I presume. There is also talking and practicing. The teacher even speaks in a slow, soothing voice. It should drive me crazy. 

But after the first hour, I found myself soothed into a pensive but alert state of mind - and remembering the information afterwards.

I'm back to studying - slowly - and I relish it.

Sunday, September 15, 2024

fairytale stage

Alone in the wilderness again. The moon is a wonky orange, the sea is spilled ink, the mist blurs the edges - a fairytale stage. Hundreds of honking geese take flight with a sudden thunder of wings, unseen in the dark.

The fire is roaring happily in the wood stove. I'm in the cottage, flimsy curtains drawn against the thick, black night. This fairytale stage is set for me and my writing. This is me.

I don't even care that my car is broken and I don't know how to get home.

Saturday, August 10, 2024

summer's last, hot breath

Honking geese, berry cream cake, rain, earthy scents, warm sunset evenings, carnivals and fireworks, raw nostalgia and loneliness, hours of sleep in a silent cottage, plans and dreams, the forest.

August is emotional. Not just the end of summer  -  the end of the year.

After months of white nights here in the North of the world, there is always that night when you look up and see the first, bleak star blink into existence. One after one they come, then thousands and millions, as August dims the lights a little more for every night. 

Before summer has turned to autumn, the entire Milky Way roars in silence across the sky, sometimes licked by tendrils of Aurora Borealis. It smells of ice and eternity.