Once a year, my news filter for ‘Estonia’ inevitably brings up the annual wife-carrying championship in Sonkajärvi, which Estonians have won every single year since 1998. Two Estonian brothers have dominated the championship since 2000 and one of them holds the record: 55.5 seconds. The track is 253.5 metres of sand, grass and asphalt, and with two dry obstacles and one water obstacle.

This year I found a video of the competition (via AOL Fanhouse):

I was impressed by the effort some of the contestants were putting in. Both the runners and the women they were carrying were clearly taking this pretty seriously. These were athletic guys running hard, and women holding on hard, not beer-bellied men having a bit of fun (although there were some of those, too, given that first prize is the woman’s weight in beer).

Ingrid babbles, as babies do. And babies start out with a predictable array of first sounds – the easy ones that arise naturally as the mouth experiments with various positions. Da da da and ba ba ba and um um um and so on.

In some languages the parents have, understandably, happily appropriated those sounds and provided them with meaning: daddy and mummy, or pappa and mamma. But not in Estonian! Estonian mothers have pulled off an incredibly clever trick. They call themselves “ema” or “emme” – but they call dads “isa” or “issi”. Unable to pronounce the s sound, babies are forced to focus all attention on their mothers, and it will be many months, if not years, before they can call their dads.

I never swear. Well, never is a slight exaggeration – I know I swore in public once about 2 years ago, and I’ve probably done it a handful of times at home during recent years as well.

The thing is, I just don’t get the point of swearing. To me, swearing is an expression of impotent, inarticulate anger. I am not angry very often; if I am angry I’d rather do something about the cause than swear about it; and if I want to express my anger then I usually have something more specific to say about the cause than call it a f***ing f***er.

I keep wondering why other people swear. What satisfaction does it give them? In my experience swearing doesn’t even defuse the feeling or the situation, it just winds people up more.

Just after 9 this morning I got a phone call from the nursery saying that Ingrid had “gone floppy and her eyes rolled back”. Very scary, and not the kind of news you want to get about your one and only baby. (Not that you’d want it if you had more than one baby, either, but you know what I mean.) She recovered quickly and seemed fine, but just to be on the safe side the nursery called an ambulance (and me) and we took her to the hospital (Royal London) to be checked.

Nothing interesting was found but they wanted to keep her for observation. Nothing interesting was still found after a full day of observation and various tests, and the best they could tell me in the end was that “these thing sometimes happen and quite often we have no idea why, and it never comes back”. So I hope it’s one of those cases.

Useful outcomes:

• Blood tests were done and while they didn’t show me any of the results (of course – for some reason doctors here very rarely share any information unless they absolutely have to), they did mention that her iron values were a bit on the low side. Leafy green vegetables, coming up!
• Ingrid can sleep quite well in the Connecta if needed.

Outcomes that aren’t exactly useful, but are nevertheless interesting

• They measure babies’ blood pressure around the calf, and the pulse on the foot.
• They also take blood from the foot.
• Some nurses and doctors, despite working in the pediatric ward, seem never to have handled an actual live baby. They spent an eternity trying to stick electrodes on her for an ECG while keeping all the cables in a tangle just in front of her kicking feet, so of course she kicked them which pulled them all off again. After I had pointed this out three times, one of them finally realised the futility of it. Another nurse was going to take her temperature while she was asleep, and started off by lowering the side of the cot with a loud clang, and then seemed surprised that she woke.
• I got the impression that some of the tests they did were done not because they really expected any results, but because it would (a) preclude anybody from coming back and suing them, or (b) ensure they hit some kind of target.

Outcomes that are neither useful nor interesting:

• Most of the staff were actually helpful and sensible.
• Spending the day in a hospital for observation is about as exciting as spending the day in an airport, but with fewer shops. Most of the time is spent waiting, sitting in uncomfortable chairs. And just like airports, it’s exhausting even though you don’t actually do anything much.
• The hospital food was utterly abominable.

Brownies. I believe I’ve mentioned them a few times here.

There is a bakery stall at Spitalfields market that sells the world’s best chocolate brownies. They sell various other good things as well – loaves of bread, cakes, pastries – but it’s the brownies I keep coming back for. These are three-star brownies, the kind that are worth a special journey. They are deceptively simple, with no nuts and no decorative chocolate sprinkles on the top, but they melt in the mouth and feel so richly chocolatey. (I would guess they also contain very generous amounts of butter.)

I usually buy half a dozen, cut them in half (they’re big) and freeze them. When it’s time to eat one, I put one in the microwave so it gets all warm and squishy-soft and tastes even more. Delicious. London may not have any proper rye bread, but last I checked, Estonia didn’t have brownies like this.

For almost 10 years now, we have been keeping track of all our expenses. We started with a single Excel spreadsheet but in 2001 we switched to an Access database. Later I added an Excel front end to it so I could get some nice charts, and this year I wrote a new front end in .NET for easier data entry.

Geeky? Yes. (We’re talking about an accountant and a programmer here, after all.) But also useful and interesting. Which probably just proves the point about geekiness.

This chart shows our total spending on absolutely everything. You can see when I graduated and we moved to London in 2001… our costs more than doubled. More interestingly, though, we seem to have found a steady state since around 2002. Our salaries go up and down (mostly up, luckily) but the annual total expenses have been surprisingly stable.

We group all the individual items into around 25 categories. The tall dark red bars in the middle are for rent and utilities (insurance, electricity, heating). This category accounted for around a quarter of the total in Stockholm, and for around half in London. London is expensive.

The turquoise bars near the top are for travel. This is almost exclusively made up of holidays and flights, not local transportation. This category also grew a lot after we moved, because we could now afford holidays, and also because of our trips back home, of course. It would be noticeably larger if bicycles weren’t our main mode of transportation.

The cream-coloured one-off chunk in 2002 is our wedding, and the pale purple at the bottom of 2006 and 2007 is a category titled “baby”. The dull pinkish red at the bottom of all previous years is entertainment – movies, exhibitions, concerts etc. The baby category has almost pushed the entertainment category out of existence, both in this chart and in real life.

I find this data useful because it helps me think about what we would and could do if our income suddenly dropped – if one of us had to leave our current job, for example. We could cut our expenses by 15-20% by not travelling. We could instantly cut another 7-8% by not buying music, movies, or books and by cutting out entertainment. Move to a smaller and cheaper apartment, and we’d be close to a zero monthly balance again.

It also helps me put things into perspective. Some categories are so tiny that you cannot even see them in this chart. This tells me that I can completely stop worrying about how much I spend on them, because no matter how I splurge, that spending will be dwarfed by the real black holes. Furniture? Bought so rarely that it adds up to a minimal amount. Snacks? Costs nothing, so ignore the cost and buy the juiciest-looking cake.

There are lots of mommy blogs out there. (That’s mommy, not mummy, since the vast majority are American.) Some are well written, others are self-centred rants, but most of them are really very similar to each other and try to convince the readers that this baby is the wackiest one out there. I haven’t found any that make for interesting long-term reading, unless the reader knows the mommy or the baby.

One thing almost all of them have in common is that they post regular letters to the baby. I too have my monthly updates, but they are for myself in the future, and for my friends and family: this is what is Ingrid is up to right now. I do not pretend that I am talking to her.

If the post is not a letter to the baby, why pretend it is? And if it is, why post it publicly?

A building on Leadenhall Street has lost its bottom half. Now it looks like a mushroom. It looks impossible, like it should fall down – very obviously demonstrating that some parts of a building are load bearing and others are just… decoration.

Apparently it is being demolished to make space for another skyscraper. (I say “another” because it will be standing right next to the Gherkin and quite close to Tower 42, which is the building you can see in the background in the photo.) Given that the top of the mushroom looks about as boring and box-shaped as an office building can look, and that I cannot even recall what the bottom half looked like (apart from the fact that the ground floor used to house an M&S Simply Food shop, and that it had a sign for Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, which I remember only because BMPS is the oldest surviving bank in the world, founded in the 1400s)… given all that, I’m sure the new building will be an improvement on the old one.

(Oh… it seems I was being a bit harsh here. Apparently “on completion, the building was considered to be one of the most sophisticated examples of a glass-walled office building in England”. Well I guess it was great for 1969… but it isn’t exactly an example of timeless design.)

But I do wonder why they are demolishing it from the bottom up and not from the top down, or from the outside in, or the inside out. It seems like a very strange approach to taking down a building.

… shops don’t close for lunch but some do close for Friday prayer.

… I no longer find it surprising or even noteworthy when the women I meet in the street are dressed in abaya, hijab and niqab, covering everything except for their eyes, or when schoolgirls’ uniforms consist of a salwar kameez and a matching headscarf. In fact I find it rather more tasteful than some of the stuff I see in other parts of the city, and I am rather jealous of some of the kameezes I see. (However I do still find it odd that the same women wear open-toed sandals all year round. Doesn’t it get cold in winter?)

Speaking of covering up, I find it interesting that western women are most likely to hide their eyes behind dark sunglasses, while Muslim women do the opposite and cover everything but the eyes.

… everyone and their dog has either a travel agency or a money transfer service, often attached to some other business.
“Business centre and travel agency”
“Book shop and travel agency”
“Money transfer and ladies taylor”

As a consequence I am always up-to-date on the exchange rate of the bangladeshi taka (which generally hovers around 135 per pound) even when I have no idea what the Swedish krona might be worth. And I could find someone to book a hajj or umrah trip for me, or book a flight to Dhaka or Sylhet, far easily than I could find a diving trip.

My work inbox is overflowing. I haven’t had time to sort through my emails even once in the 6 weeks I have been working. I react to those that are urgent, delete those that obviously have no archive value, and the rest just piles up.

It struck me recently that working part-time is really a magic trick, sleight of hand, misdirection. One works fewer hours but doesn’t do any less work. Instead the full amount of work gets squeezed into fewer hours. No wonder the firm is so happy to oblige those who want to work part time!

But I wouldn’t want to have any of the alternatives (no work or full time work) either.