Happy Feelings at the Awakening of Finnish Spring, Summer and Autumn / Helsinki, Spirit Level Cities, Scarry Cities and Opaque Cities

(“Happy feelings at the awakening of Finnish Spring” being one of the alternative titles cheekily used by performers of Sibelius’ ‘Finlandia’ in its early performances, in order to escape Russian censorship.)

We had two summers in the calendar year of 2011. We arrived in Helsinki in the Finnish Spring, fresh from the Australian Late-Summer. Before long, the Finnish Summer announced itself with glorious sunshine and warmth creeping across southern Finland. Helsinki in summer could be surprisingly warm, touching the mid-thirties on the streets around our apartment. On holiday in the UK in July, I found myself saying something I thought I never would: I miss the heat of the Helsinki sun.

By September it was deeply Autumnal, though. Up in Lahti a month ago, the gutters were already lined with soggy piles of decomposing leaves. To the south, here in Helsinki, we’re in a schizophrenic state in which summer and autumn co-exists from one hour to the next.

The next punctuation mark in the seasonal calendar here is ruska, a word which has no particular counterpart in English as far as I can see. Perhaps the diametric opposite of the week of cherry blossom in Japan. Ruska is the one…