With all the snow that we have in Stockholm now, the kids will never believe me if I tell them that when I was a kid I had to walk barefoot through more snow than they’ve ever seen. But, fortunately, I have other stories to make my own childhood seems fairly Dickensian.

Like the fact that I didn’t have a real bed when I was five years old and, instead, slept on a piece of cardboard between two chairs that faced each other.

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To say that I am a handyman is a major overstatement. In fact, if somebody comes up to you and tells you that, call him a liar. That’s what it is, an outright lie. I can’t fix anything, I can’t build anything, unless I can do it with tape. (But I did once write a series of columns under the pseudonym "Handy Cap").

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The plan was to get up early and see Helsinki from afar, from the sea. See the two churches somewhere in the horizon, the President’s castle, the City Hall, and the market square, and the Ferris wheel of the amusement park. I wanted to go out to Deck 12 as the ferry was approaching the tiny bay, and I wanted to feel the cold air on my face, and I wanted to worry about how the wind was going to mess up my hair.

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On the ground floor of our apartment building, about a floor and a half below us, there was a barbershop. The barber of the barbershop was something of a celebrity, a popular local hero, a sports fan, a fisherman, and an artist.

But first and foremost he was a barber, and because he was Dad’s childhood buddy, and because he had his shop in our building, that’s where I went to get my hair cut. Or, that’s where I went when Mom told me to get a haircut.

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