With friends in Tartu, playing Potion Explosion.

The kids like to do things together with us adults, naturally. But they are not too fond of the adult activities that feel too much like work (such as cooking) whereas I’m not too fond of playing with their toys. I can build with Legos or other construction toys for a while, but when the building turns into playing with what we built, I just feel like I’m going to die of boredom.

I’m glad that both kids are now of an age that we can play board games together. It’s an activity that we can do together and really enjoy, all of us. For some harder games, Adrian teams up with someone else, but quite often he can hold his own.

I recently bought a bunch of new games; Potion Explosion was one of them. It was easy to get started with (the age recommendation of 14 years is ludicrous) and quite a lot of fun, so we brought it with us to Estonia to play with friends here as well.

For the first time in decades, I went to a song festival. It’s an Estonian tradition going back almost 150 years, and an amazing experience. This year’s event was not the “full” festival but the youth festival, with a particular focus on young composers, conductors and performers. (The full one is a bit larger.) Even so, there was a choir of 10,000+ singers and 50,000 people in the audience. Awe-inspiring, quite literally.

We were a bit late to the venue so we ended up sitting further back that I had hoped, among the trees at the top of the slope, and didn’t quite get the full impact of the ten thousand voices. So we’ll have to attend the next one again and be there earlier, to get an even better experience.

I have vague, distant memories of attending the festival as a small child. Somewhat more strongly I remember the extraordinary (in all senses of the word) “Song of Estonia” festival in 1988, attended according to some claims by a quarter of the population of Estonia. I was a callow child, uninterested in current affairs, but even I could feel history being made on that day.

Due to strong headwinds and unspecified “technical issues”, the ferry was over two hours late arriving to Tallinn.

There isn’t much to do on a ferry other than eat/drink or browse the tax free shops, neither of which we are interested in. The cabins are tiny and claustrophobic. The seats in the lounge areas are all full. At the Tallinn end of the trip, there isn’t even a view to be had from the lounges – just dull gray seas. (Meanwhile at the Stockholm end the views of the archipelago are almost worth a trip of their own.)

Luckily the ferries sometimes convert a café or a conference centre into a play area during summer. This one had a small ball pit, some building blocks, and ride-on cars and ball hoppers.