Speaking of stone…

Apropos nothing in particular, but I find this very soothing:

Perhaps if I were having a really awful day with the usual failure and frustration squared and peppered with bad weather, a few pebbles on the shore would do nothing at all to lift my spirits. But as it is a Sunday, the tide is out, the sun is shining and there is definitely a lot of spring in the air, I can be readily captivated by rock.

Sandy beaches are all very well and good but I have rarely wanted to stuff my pockets with sand. Picking up pebbles that have been rounded and smoothed by the sea, however, is hard to resist. There is something so perfect about them. Perhaps it is the idea of soft stone that is so pleasing to me: if solid stone can feel soft in this world, can it really be such a bad place?

Applied sorcery for the practical immigrant

At the end of last year I thought I was living in uncertain times. For one, times have pretty much always been uncertain, so it was a reasonable bet. I therefore also concluded that this year it would be prudent to evoke some trusted traditions to predict the future and to ensure good fortune. After all, superstition is a centuries-old method for dealing with uncertain times.

Melting tin and pouring it into cold water on New Year’s Eve is widespread practice in Finland. Everyone melts a scoopful, dips it into a bucket and then inspects the cooled lump or its shadow for any recognisable shapes that could reveal what the next year will bring. I took my scoop and my box of recycled tin to a friend’s house where I spent New Year’s Eve, pestered my host for a bucket of cold water, parked next to the fireplace, and then initiated everyone in this exotic custom.

My lump of tin emerged looking like a wonky mermaid, a half-excavated skeleton, or possibly a half-excavated skeleton of a wonky mermaid. With years of experience in this particular bit of sorcery I was confident to say I didn’t have the foggiest what that was supposed to mean.

That’s my fortune good and told.

I succeeded equally well in Scottish Hogmanay traditions: dark-haired men were a bit thin on the ground when I returned home the next morning, so I first-footed my own house like the self-sufficient woman that I am, and poured myself a wee dram of lemonade hoping that would be sufficient to secure my usual share of prosperity and good cheer.

Nordic nations also have a variety of Midsummer magic to choose from. One popular belief is that if a lady looks into a spring at midnight on Midsummer’s Eve, she will see her future spouse in her reflection. I will admit to a moderate level of scorn when it comes to matrimony-related charms, but since saunas and lakeside bonfires are not a done thing in Scotland, I decided to privately mark Midsummer by peering into a spring. Only I couldn’t think of any nearby springs.

I decided a medieval well would do; expats must be allowed some modifications. Come Midsummer’s Eve, it was obvious that this piece of magic was designed for more northern latitudes where the sun doesn’t set. Particularly because it was raining, Denburn Wood was pitch dark. The light from my lantern was feeble (somehow a powerful headlamp just didn’t seem to go together with old-fashioned magic), and no matter which way I hovered it over the Rule Well, I could not see one glimpse of the surface of the water. At 23:47 I ruled that waiting for midnight in the dripping shrubbery simply wasn’t worth it: the well was covered with an iron grille, so at best I could expect to see myself incarcerated in a very damp place, and I honestly wasn’t that fussed, because I could see a sandwich and a dry bed in my immediate near future without any magic at all.

Oh, well. I will probably hold onto my day job as a scientist for a little while longer. Witchcraft clearly isn’t my forte.

…and if my future spouse really is down there, then good luck to him!

Rock ‘n’ loll

I’ve said this before but it bears repeating: seals have two highly enviable aspects to their lives. Whilst the rest of us struggle to keep our weight under such control as to allow us to fit into our last summer’s clothes, seals can be as chubby as they please, and a decent layer of lard is nothing but beneficial to them. Seals also seem to spend a considerable amount of their time lolling on rocks. You know, just casually lying there with the water lapping at their flippers, occasionally rolling from one side to another perhaps treating themselves to an absent-minded scratch or two.

One of the permanent fixtures on my ever-changing and expanding list of favourite animals is the Saimaa ringed seal, Pusa hispida saimensis, which is one of the rarest seals in the world. Only an estimated 320 live in Finland in the lake Saimaa, and they are of course very endangered, a bit mysterious, and totally disarming. And utterly, utterly distracting as I have found to my peril this week.

In May Saimaa ringed seals spend a fair few hours in rock-lolling duty because they are shedding their fur. WWF Finland has installed a webcam on a spot a couple of seals frequent in the spring, and the live stream is both calming and oddly addictive. A lot of the time there’s no seal in sight. There’s just the water licking at the empty rock. The sun shines. Sometimes it rains. And when a seal appears nothing much happens. The seal is just, you know, casually lying there with the water lapping at its flippers, occasionally rolling from one side to another… Riveting stuff. And I cannot stop watching. Never mind pressing deadlines, never mind manuscripts, forget all microscopy. Emails, you say? Nah. I am too busy staring at this video feed of a bare rock that sometimes has a slumbering seal on it.

This is happiness, I tell you. Colour me mesmerised.

(Have a look at http://wwf.fi/elainlajit/saimaannorppa/#norppalive but don’t say you weren’t warned!)

May Day colours

Speaking of 3D awesomeness, I do seem to have a talent for enjoying the simplest things for rather more complicated reasons. Shall we again begin with the equivalent of ancient Romans? Here goes.

One of the best things about being an expat (or an immigrant or what ever you wish to call a citizen on loan like me) is the fun one can have with combining traditions which on the grass root level pretty much equal the foods people eat on specific days. And even without traditional foods, observing holidays from two cultures provides a whole host of excuses for applied celebrations. St Andrew’s Day? Sure, let’s eat! Finnish Independence Day? Cool, let’s eat again!

Another point that needs to be made is that in addition to fresh green, orange and yellow are my favourite colours. They are cheerful, vibrant and warm, and they make me think happy thoughts. And truthfully, I’m not fussy. I like most colours when they match beautifully. I really get such disproportionate kicks from matching colours!

Orange and yellow May Day flowers for your viewing pleasure and for my disproportionate kicks

So. The correct course of action on May Day in Finland is to drink home-made mead and to eat doughnuts. Mead is a very mild, fermented lemon drink with a shed-load of sugar in it, and it happens to be of a pleasant, golden shade of yellow. This year I decided to stick with tradition, so I made myself some. But because I am a bit of a geek on foreign soil and because I can’t get enough of matching, warm colours, come May Day morning I poured myself two glasses: one of mead and another one of Irn-Bru.

Finnish tradition (left) meets Scottish obsession (right), and look how beautifully they match!

And there I sat admiring my own multiculturally colourful genius until I drank the lot and ate the doughnut (sourced from the shop around the corner). Healthy breakfast this was not, but since it was May Day, the devil may care!