Autumn thoughts

Autumn has arrived in Helsinki. This is usually characterised by one of many things.

Firstly, the leaves all turn various shades of brown, which is admittedly quite nice and I would probably enjoy it if it didn't signal the imminent arrival of 6 months of freezing my butt off. The Finns have a word, "ruska", which means the brown colour that leaves take on in the autumn. The Finns are well known for being close to nature and, even if it's being lost now as people are staying in the city to pursue activities such as working and going to the pub, there are still many times of year where Helsinki empties out completely and is strangely quiet as everyone disappears off to their cabins in the forest. While I've been here I've done many nature-related things that I haven't done anywhere else - going out looking for flying squirrels, cross-country skiing in the woods, shooting fish with harpoons, and a few weeks back a work trip was organised to a national park to go hiking around the forest in this newly found brown colour. In a bid to discover if the Finns just are close enough to nature to have a word that means "the brown colour that leaves take on in the autumn", I went onto Wikipedia to see what it translates as - the only other languages with one word for this seemed to be Afrikaans (Herfskleure) and Japanese (紅葉). Visually, it's quite a nice time of year. The immense amount of leaves on the ground, though, cause havoc to the half-asleep early morning commuter such as myself due to another factor of this season.

That second factor is the wind, which for some reason arrives in enormous amounts around this time of year. Many Finns in fact have taken holidays to the Caribbean given that they find the lashings of Hurricane Ike et al. quite peaceful compared to the battering they would get walking down a street in Helsinki. Heavy winds plus lots of leaves results in you getting assaulted by various pieces of foliage on your way to work especially if you work in a tree-filled area like I do. Although it's annoying (and let's face it, what isn't at that time of morning ?), it's quite good for waking you up. Another positive aspect of the wind coming at high speeds at this time of year is as a result of the average Finn starting to don headgear due to the dropping temperatures. It's not cold enough for the heavy duty woolly hats of winter but the citizen of Helsinki still likes to protect his head from the cooler air and the baseball cap appears to be the item of choice at the moment. This, of course, leads to crowds of young men running around desperately chasing caps which the wind is carrying off, which is clearly quite amusing. I've noticed that the "wind blowing cap off head routine" usually follows a very rigid pattern.

1) Cap blows off from head
2) Ex-cap wearer notices this but for some reason pats his head anyway, just to verify that it is, in fact, gone
3) Ex-cap wearer looks startled
4) Ex-cap wearer turns around many more times than is necessary in a desperate attempt to locate the cap before it has been blown half way to Turku
5) Ex-cap wearer runs towards the cap and tries to pick it up just as it is blown away by another gust of wind
6) Repeat ad nauseam
7) Ex-cap wearer eventually gets pissed off and jumps onto the cap, having to then brush it off but being thankful to be reunited with it nonetheless.

It's one of those things that shouldn't really be very interesting but it breaks the monotony of everyday life and I'll generally stop to have a good look.

It's probably the fact of finding this entertaining (as well as realising that all I do is work, wash up, do laundry, cook, eat and sit around waiting for something to happen) which make me wonder how people can survive as office monkeys for 40 years before retiring to a beach somewhere to soak up the rays before they die. It's nice to have a couple of jobs and get some money coming in but it's not very fulfilling is it ? More fulfilling than watching Big Brother or Pop Idol, admittedly, but still not immensely so. For once, I'm not going to blame Finland for this - I'd imagine workers the world over have the same syndrome but I suppose most people are also content enough with it to stay in the hamster wheel. M and I are off to the Balkans in December so hopefully I can rekindle the excitement in life a little. Until then, I'll keep working, washing up, eating and watching peoples' caps blow off.

In another bid to spice up life a little, I've recently discovered the Darwin Awards website, which honours people who died in quite frankly ridiculous ways. It's worth a little look, if only to feel slightly better about yourself after reading about the Chinese woman who died after climbing into a volcano to get better pictures, the Italian who perished while trying to protect his car by placing himself between it and an express train, the Polish man who tried to prove his manliness by removing his head with a chainsaw, or the German who allowed himself to be shot dead by his own dog. It's riveting stuff and can be found at www.darwinawards.com/darwin.

Have a good autumn !