In the fantasy version of my life I live in a Jacobean farmhouse somewhere, with a lavender and pink rose border lining the path to the front foor, and herbaceous borders the lawns. And somewhere there’s a perfect kitchen garden, full of pretty vegetables and herbs and edible flowers. I’m not much of a gardener, truth to be told tho, so I will probably always keep indulging in this fantasy merely by visiting other people’s gardens…
Today is the second day of St Giles Fair in Oxford, a date in the calendar that symbolically marks the end of the summer; Oxfordshire state schools start on the Wednesday after the fair, and the next big festival is Christmas. The end of summer compelled me to look at photos in my camera, taken while visiting Finland this summer, and somehow they didn’t quite bring back happy memories of a golden summer, even if the trip itself was perfectly pleasant. These are pictures of days so quiet times seems to stop (and not always in a good way), of doing nothing, of solitary walks when one’s yearning for company, of overcast days when the temperature refuses to raise above +16 degrees and the most exciting thing that happens all day long is heating the sauna.
I’m ready for the autumn.
The summer in 10 photos.
Better late than never. I finally got around to going through the summer photos, which brought both few moments of happiness and few moments of crushing disappointment. Whole set of photos taken in a fishing port in Haukipudas, northern Finland, were overexposed beyond salvation – the day was in turns cloudy and sunny and rainy, and my settings just didn’t keep up.
Small fishing boats – the main fleet was out on the sea.
For the first time in a very long time I visited Helsinki. Ten years ago it was a big city. After years of regularly going to London it’s small, idyllic, pretty and parochial. But it has a good drive – lots of culture, especially indie and alternative, and the city is just small enough to have the kind of creative atmosphere bigger cities sometimes lack. And it is by the sea. Oh the sea! Eight years in the most landlocked place of this island has made me ache for the sea. For the rocky shores of southern Finland, for the marshes and reeds of northern Finland, and for the gentle waters of the Baltic. The water is not as salty as “proper” seawater, so it is dark brown in colour, and the contrast with the blue skies brilliant.
Sveaborg off the coast of Helsinki. This place has the feel of all Chekhov’s plays rolled together, of time standing still on the empty courtyards and in the windswept houses. This used to be military base, and the houses are like barracks. Same architects who built St. Petersburg built Helsinki too, and it’s for me impossible to think of one without thinking the other.
The Military Academy church has a lighthouse in its bell tower.
The walls are looking at you.
Laundry drying on wooden rails.
These are pictures I took over the two weeks I spent in Finland late in July. I spent a lot of time by the sea, and had planned on making this post about the arctic seascapes. But, as it sometimes happens, something changed when the pictures traveled from the camera to the computer. What a month ago looked beautiful and captured the feeling of the moment perfectly, now just looks like an ordinary picture of an ordinary rock.
Nothing here is special in photographic sense. These are snapshots of what might have been the last, golden summer I’ll ever spend at home, many so personal I couldn’t share them with anyone yet.
Lupins in my parents’ garden.
The accidental raspberries.
Once long ago, my father lived here. Now this big, beautiful house is empty and unused, and it makes me rather sad – such glorious building. (This and the rest of vertically oriented photos have been scaled to the column margins – click the photo for original resolution.)
Nothing says end of summer like fireweed. The most common flower in Finland, it starts blossoming in the north when almost everything else has already turned to seed.
I love wind turbines; they have been around for so long that they have become a natural part of the Finnish landscape.
Sunset by the sea.
All summer, I tried to photograph a butterfly. This is the best I managed, I’m afraid.
Fishing and hoping and thinking and praying.
To quote Andrew Motion, there is a severe absence of fish.
This is the last photo I took in Finland, and it’s far from perfect, but the memory of that evening is much treasured. The bond I have with my hometown – a plain, unexciting industrial town in the north, not small but not a big city either – is probably more imaginary than it is real. I have been gone for a long time, and probably wouldn’t keep going back if it wasn’t for my family; I rarely miss this place when I’m gone. My childhood was fairly urban. We lived near town centre when I was a kid, and my walk to school took me across heavily trafficked roads, through estates of 1950s apartment blocks and over a bridge perched above the churning waters passing through the hydroelectric power station. I always walked with a friend, and we would see the odd suicide candidate or a flasher, and still somehow lived to tell the tale – kids these days, they have no idea. I miss the water – the clean, shining brackish water of the Ostrobotnian gulf and the tender, warm waters of the lakes and ponds we used to swim in – and I miss the snow, the kind of snow what never falls here, damp and heavy when it first falls, crisp and sparkly after it has frozen. And the autumn! The glorious autumn!
Butterfly in the library 