Strange Worlds

Today

I couldn't think of a title for this right now but this was today. I sent silent thanks to whoever it was that put the chair in such a photographically delightful spot!

Just a cell phone snap for Facebook but somehow the composition is just right: the position of the chair in the picture, the tilt of the horizon etc. I took plenty of pictures with my proper camera but I can just bet that none of them are EXACTLY the same!

A Story in a Park Bench

My steps today took me along the bay in central Helsinki as I remembered there was something carved in one of the benches along the shore which I'd seen a while ago and wanted to photograph properly. I decided to do a series of the benches. 

This one's just a cell phone picture but a good one as such and one I really like: the positive, optimistic message/exhortation, the weather-beaten and grey but warm-feeling surface of the bench, the scratching on it, and as a sort of a contrast to the message and the wood the desolate feeling of the cigarette butts. There's a story in the picture, whatever it might be. I hope it's a happy one: a group of young people sitting here in the evening, smoking and enjoying each other's company, and one of them happily writing the exhortation; or perhaps a happy couple watching the sunset. But it might be a sad story too: someone sitting alone, disappointed in love, after a relationship with a too possessive and jealous partner, expressing his or her feelings in that message on the wood surface (as in wanting to say how it should be instead of how it was). Or it might have been a campaigner for optimism, going around the city leaving his or her messages for anyone who happened on the spot to find.

It's such an ordinary, everyday image, but at the same time so moving.

Things done

These two pictures rather finely illustrate what I've been doing lately.

There's this one spot in one of the forest areas here in Helsinki where I keep finding porcini - provided that it rains a bit here and there. Not a huge amount at one go but enough for a couple of meals and to put one package in the freezer. Now porcini are the best kind of mushrooms there are. Delicious in pasta sauce and risotto, or just fried in a pan and eaten on toast. The Italians buy any amount. They know their food, the Italians. They're not getting any of mine though.

My birthday was on friday. As I've now things to do (couple of applications, article work), I didn't have the energy to go anywhere or arrange anything. I just bought a bottle of fine red (a South-African one, Rust en Vrede Estate Cabernet 2004) and enjoyed it with brie, crackers and pears. On saturday, however, we had a family dinner at a lovely restaurant not far from where I live, located in a manor park, in the old steward's house: myself, my father, sister, brother, sister-in-law and younger nephew (the elder didn't feel like coming). Had a lovely time, in a lovely setting, and the food was delicious (I had roast lamb and American mud cake with vanilla ice cream). My nephew gave me a lovely birthday card, pictured above. Notice the artist's signature, "KUUTTI 2010". Rather a fine work, I must say.