Hello, it's been a while, and bye for now, too, although hope to be back sooner this time

So you think right, today's the day I'll start Christmas cleaning. Not that I care all that awfully about Christmas as such - for various reasons it is firmly associated with various anxieties in my mind, and fails to deliver a sense of (for the lack of a better word) spiritual event (I vastly prefer Easter, if you must know), but every now and then it's very satisfying to immerse oneself in an orgy of cleaning. Before you start, though, you must do the dishes you so spectacularly failed to do last night, as well as finish reading your paper (there's been these terrorist attacks in Mumbai, you know), and read The Poniatric Englishman's latest post (when he posts, it's always a treat). During these things, you will realise there's a play on tonight, at one of the small Helsinki theatres, which you'd quite like to see (you met the guy who designed the prosthetic-leg things, complete with varicose veins, at a party you went to - in itself, a rare occurrence), and toy with the idea of chucking cleaning altogether, in favour of more artistical indulgences. This seems both like a good idea (the best and sometimes only way to go and do stuff is to surprise oneself and do it without any warning or planning) and a terrifying one, and you're relieved to find they still have plenty of performances and you can go and do it another time. So it's back to cleaning, hurrah, and there's also a Russian series on TV which you've been following, as well as a four-part BBC travel programme about Paris (quite good to knit to), and a documentary about Kieslowski plus a film of his - all this you'd miss if you ventured to the theatre. Before you start cleaning, though, you could go and have a cigarette on the balcony, and you do. While you're out there relaxedly smoking, you can ponder over whether you should put the rugs (rolled up and stored in the walk-in cupboard to protect them from your dogot-on-heat) on the floor after hoovering and mopping it, even though the rugs themselves haven't been taken on the rug balcony for a beating, and which you cannot do until Monday morning (or you could, but you're not supposed to), and how nice it would be to be able to walk into the walk-in cupboard again (the rugs effectively make this an impossibility), and whether, once the rugs were out, you might not finally pack up all your summer clothes and take them down into the cellar, but in order to do this, you will have to unpack the box the winter clothes are in, and while you could just put them somewhere for the time being - so as to free the space for the summer clothes being packed away, you understand - it is still a troubling thing to know you haven't anywhere to put them, really, and you think that so much seems to depend on the fact that you can't get round to buying some of those storage-basket things which you could keep in the hall closet to house all your winter things like woolly socks and stuff, and the lack of baskets and the absolute impossiblity of getting round to buying such things becomes the symptomatic emblem, the symbol of your failure to function as a grown-up woman in the world (other people are so organised, you know, by comparison to me), and releases the balcony-leap fantasy again. This must not be taken very seriously at all, you know, for I live on the tenth floor and my balcony nearly always releases that fantasy in me - "do please leap before you fall" - although I haven't always suffered from vertigo and don't really have it terribly badly now (I can, after all, live on the tenth floor and use the balcony very regularly). The first time I remember being hit by it was about a decade ago, when I took my older son on the Big Wheel thing in the Helsinki fun fair. I was not expecting to be scared, so it hit me by surprise in a most unpleasant manner. He was peeking over the edge of the little round boat thing we were suspended in, and I fought hard to keep it together somehow, when all I wanted was to hug the central pole which sustained our life with all fours and wail in terror, never mind the distinctly unimpressed-looking middle-aged man of stereotypical Finnishness and his toddler daughter. Another really unpleasant vertigo experience also has my son in it, we were in Budapest together and went to that big cathedral there - I fail to remember the name. The views were really outstanding and he ran around the dome once or twice less apathetically than you'd expect a thirteen-year-old to do, but there was no way on earth I was going to be able to leave the wider balcony bit to do the same. I was surprised to find a photo of him there - I hadn't lost the ability to point and shoot, anyway, which is a good thing. Here, look:

And before I start hoovering, I will, of course, need to go to the shop and make something to eat. Maybe I'll just leave the cleaning till tomorrow, this blog post's taken up ages. Hurrah.