Upside down and looking daft

Often, when I see street artists, and every time I see artists that do things that completely surprise me, I try to think of how they get ready for another day’s work.

How the large man in Cologne gets up, checks his water bottles, fills them up with fresh, clean, pure water, and then takes the bus to the shopping street next to the cathedral and entertains people by drinking up all the water, a few liters at a time, only to then somehow get it all up and become a human water fountain.

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Facts of wife

Travel does broaden the mind, and if broadening your mind is something for you, nothing works better than a road trip. One day, you may wake up in a container in Cornwall, then walk through a rain forest biome in the Eden Project, take a left turn and find a wonderful inn, visit King Arthur’s Tintangel, and end the day at Grittleton. Or, maybe you wake up in Grittleton, drive to see the Stonehenge in the morning, and then have lunch at Bath, and dinner at Grittleton’s Neeld Arms.

Basically, you just learn things.

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Chip off the old bloke

I have made it. Or, this blog has hit the big time. I (It) now have (has) a parody account. It’s called Son. Whenever something unexpected occurs – for example, when he eats a spoonful of ketchup at an inn, thinking it’s special Cornish sauce – he asks me if I’m going to blog about it, and then launches into a parody narration: “When I was a kid back in Finland…” in a thick American accent.

The other day, as we were walking back from the Brighton Pier, he did that thing and then asked me if I was going to blog about it. When I said I might, he asked me what the blog would be about.

And I said, “Well, Son, it’d go something like this.”

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Sister, sister

Back when Wife and I had just met, and before we lived a walking distance from each other but in our own apartments, and before we had started to regularly spend the nights together in either one of them, it sometimes happened that Wife would leave my place in the evening and sleep at her sister’s place two subway stops down the red line.

One such time, when Wife and I saw each other the next morning at the office, and as we recapped our evenings, she, for a reason I can’t remember anymore, said casually that “she only has hard bread”. Meaning the Swedish knäckebröd, or crispbread, a flat and crisp rye bread.

“Oh,” I said, while making a mental note to always have fresh bread at home when Wife would visit.

“But I like crispbread,” she added, and I made a note of that, too.

I was definitely going to stock up on the knäckebröd as well. (But I was also going to make sure that as long as Wife was hanging out with me, she’d always – always – have soft bread to eat).

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Like a boss

Everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die, and in a similar fashion, I would love to look good but I hate shopping. Not with passion because I don’t care enough, but still, enough to own several T-shirts from the previous century.

And that’s why I am a lightning-fast shopper when I do hit the shops. I have an image in my head going in, and when I see the thing that matches that image, I’ll buy it.

Admittedly, it doesn’t mean that I have style, or that I’ll look good (or at least as good as in the image in my head) but most of the times I’ll be pleased with what I see in the mirror.

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Freeze frame

“Tricks are a curious thing. I remember when I was a little kid in Joensuu, Finland, I used to play basketball with my father at a nearby schoolyard, and while I’m a man of the streets, I’m the laaaaaaast person…“

*Record Scratch*

*Freeze Frame*

Yup, that’s me. You’re probably wondering how I ended up in this situation… Well, it all began with reader interaction. In other words, I asked Son if he had read my previous blog entry, and whether he thought it was any good.

“Yeah, it was good. Liked it,” he said.

“But it didn’t have enough of me in it,” he added.

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Tape delay

I’m one of those Dads who like to tell stories about the tough times of their childhoods. I’m the guy who tells his kids he didn’t have any toys as a kid, and when they challenge me, I tell them to ask Grandma. And when she laughs and says that I most definitely had toys, I challenge her, and make her list all of my toys, and when she only remembers three of four, I say, “ha!”

And when I then tell Son and Daughter how I had to make cows out of (used) matches and a pair of pine cones, they look at me like I’m crazy and then we have to go on Wikipedia to see what a “cow” is. (I’m kidding, Son and Daughter have seen cows in the wild.)

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Forever young

Now, if I may say so myself, Im a pretty youthful guy. I have a long hair, and I wear the same clothes I’ve worn since my twenties, and I understand if that creeps you out, dear reader, but that’s the way I am. At some point in my life, in my teens, I became a jeans and a T-shirt kind of guy, and that’s just what I’ve been ever since. (With one minor but important change about 17 years ago when I stopped using socks).

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Keep calm and carry ön

Last year, I spent a lot of time at the The National Library of Sweden in Stockholm, doing research for an article series I was working on, and almost every time I walked back to the train through the city tunnel comes out to Olof Palme’s Street. And every time I was there, I thought of my high school Swedish teacher because I think I remember her saying that it might be smart to read up on Olof Palme, because it was possible he was going to be an essay topic in our high school finals.

“Now that he got assassinated and all,” she said.

That may be a false memory because I can see on Wikipedia that by the time the Swedish Prime Minister was shot in downtown Stockholm, my and my classmates had already left school for our study period during which we were supposed to cram for the final exams.

Maybe she told us that during one of the visits back to school when we had our “pre-finals”, or maybe she never said it at all. All I know is that I did not brush up my knowledge on Sweden or Palme, and instead, focused on biology and history of Finland.

Sweden, Palme, and the prime suspect, Christer Pettersson of Sollentuna, seemed so far away.

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