Thursday, April 26

Finnish Air Museum, 14:20

Today is a planning day, and to help us plan we have travelled to the Finnish Air Museum. WE have spent the morning listening to a man from Novia describing their working practices, and then discussed our own. We have had lunch and now we are taking an hour off for a guided tour of the actual aeroplanes.

There are a lot of them crammed together. It feels like a supermarket car park from an alternative earth where everyone actually has flying cars of one sort or another. We have seen lots of biplanes from the twenties, thirties and forties and now we are looking at more modern aircraft.

I am standing inside a Corsair painted in Finnair colours because it flew for Finnair for thirty years, ending sometime in the eighties. Affe said that this was the first plane he ever flew on, when he made a flight from Tampere to Helsinki in the nineteen sixties.

Later we will return to discussion in an oddly fractured manner that resembles the oddly fractured manner that seems to render these discussions pointless every year. That and the fact that we return to them each year as though it was our first time together without ever referring back to the previous year’s plan which has lain in the dust unnoticed for eleven months.

Or maybe I am simply missing something…

At some point in the afternoon I will receive a phone call from Auo who is very upset with how her twenty minutes talk of the demographics of Iceland went. She will tell me that she was almost too scared to talk and that she couldn’t read some parts, and the teacher said the paper was very good but the presentation was appalling.

Personally, I am appalled that any ten year old would even be asked to stand up in front of the class and deleiver a twenty minute presentation on the demographics of Iceland.

Or maybe I am simply missing something…