The Catch Up

Helsinki bus station has been swallowed by Earth. I stand where it used to be, my bus is leaving in 10 minutes but, oh alas!, I cannot find the station. The web service informed me that the departure was at 14.45 from Kamppi bus station (behind Lasipalatsi – precisely where buses used to leave from 8 years ago, or so I thought). I have to ring my sister-in-law to enquire where the bus station has gone to. “Underground” she laughs. “You know the big Kamppi shopping centre, you’ll spot a set of stairs going down, it’s there”. “No” I sulked in response, “I don’t know the Kamppi shopping centre, I’ve never been there and there are no signs anywhere for the station either”. Turns out the Kamppi shopping centre is a spitting distance from the old yellow building that used to be the bus station, and underneath this monstrous retail complex hidden inside its’ guts, is the shiny new bus station. I get there just in time for my bus, but I can’t find the ticket office anywhere, so I miss the connection. Tuusula thankfully has regular connections from Helsinki, so I catch the 15.03 instead. I discover I could have bought the ticket from the driver, I didn’t need to find the ticket office at all. I am peeved. I have this false sense of confidence that I know how things work and definitely where things are in Helsinki, but as it happens, my tacit knowledge is utterly out of date.

I attended a family gathering at the weekend, my aunt and my old art teacher of 6 years, Eeva, celebrated her 70^th birthday. I remember her 60^th, as well as her 50^th birthday celebrations, which makes me feel my own age. My aunt’s big birthdays coincide with my grandmother’s, she is 80 in a week’s time. Embarrassingly I no longer recognised some of my more distant relatives, and I found myself telling the same story time and again about where I am and what I do these days. I used to be at the heart of things in my extended family, if anyone would be asked to bake a cake or help out with practical arrangements, it would be me. It felt bizarre just to walk in like any guest to a party that had been planned and arranged without any input from me. In many ways it was a trip down memory lane, made all the more intensive by my aunt’s lovely display of her works in the garden and patio area turned into an exhibition space. Amongst the oeuvres were three images of me, aged 6:

I have vivid recollections of sitting for her, Eeva
indeed verified that I used to be her favourite still
life model because I had the patience just to sit there for ages (unlike most children, even grown-ups). For me it was a pleasant experience, I remember the rhythmic sound of charcoal on rough sketching paper, it was as though I could feel the eyes of the artist drawing on my skin.

To continue the narrative of happy reunions, Restaurant Comrade proved to be the smartest venue imaginable in the heart of Kallio, a perfect location for a hard core catch-up with my old bestest comrade Susanna (pictured with me outside the “Comrade”). We used to be inseparable at school, but we haven’t met in over two years! The Comrade has a very chic ambiance complete with vintage leather furniture, perfectly fit for the intellectuals and leftie-liberals who favour this part of town. The pair of us perhaps the least smooth element there that evening, although it was quiet for a Thursday, we made sure after 3 bottles of wine that it was quiet no longer. Susanna doesn’t remember cycling home and I woke up Friday morning with the lights on. The last time we had a decent catch-up, I ended up nearly missing my flight to Manchester the next morning and at the airport, just as I thought things couldn’t get any worse, I found myself inside a cubical in the men’s toilet as my flight was announced for boarding.

All that ends well...