Dinner party joy

It began with a boast about gravlax.

'What's that then?' asked Emily.

'It's where you take salmon and you cure it in your fridge on a bed of rock salt (maybe with a bit of vodka too) and you serve it up with rye bread and cream cheese and dill andlemon and radishes and it's delicious. We used to gravlax a whole salmon every Finnish Independence day, and another one for Christmas lunch.'

'Ooooh! Sounds amazing. Tomaz loves seafood - can we make some when he visits from Slovenia?'

So this week, I brought together four facets of the life we used to lead, in the charismatic-but-falling-down house in Abbotsford: finnish food, good food and wine (we opened a 1998 Allsaints Marsanne - and it was a bit old, but yuuuummmmy!), a place where friends can come and just 'be', and a space where being a 'citizen of the world' is all that counts. The challenge was to put together a three course meal that had a seafood theme to all three courses. The gravlax entree (in the UK they call it a 'starter') was the easy part.

From there we moved on to a seafood risotto ('king' prawns were recently on sale at Sainsbury's - the mostly-english dinner guests all oooh-ed and aaaah-ed about the size of them, but they were soo little compared to even the ordinary prawns we get at home!) and that amazing Marsanne.

Then came my cunning piece de resistance: Guylian chocolate seashells floating on a 'sea' of mousse. The original plan was a chocolate mousse, but a week ago I realised that everything except the mousse was on the 'safe' list of a friend who is on a really insane allergy-testing regime (fish, rice, certain veg, lemons, dairy stuff as long as it's 'on the side). And apples. So I found, and followed, a recipe for a baked 'apple mousse' and it worked a treat! (More visions of all those feasts where, without batting an eyelid, we planned medieval feasts for 100, where vegans, coeliacs and even 'people who don't like onions or mushrooms' could all eat to their heart's content).

So we ate, we drank, we conversed until late on topics from here to the moon and round all the known stars. Thank you Emily, Tomaz, Brenda and Tess. I don't know why I let myself get out of the habit of evenings such as this.

I feel more alive than I have in years.

PS. Hyvaa Itsenaisyyspaivaa....

Tribute to a great Saint

One of the things Mikko has missed out on in a big way is the resurgence of his beloved St Kilda football club. One of the few teams to have won just a single premiership - and that all the way back in 1966 - he adopted them because his Australian family, the Colquhouns, were all Saints fans. (I do hope they were allowed to keep the jersey they gave him for his 30th: they weren't sure about the gift idea when I suggested it, but he 'fucking loved it'.) And together, Saints fans back their boys through hard times, and only slightly less hard times, year after year.

I personally reckon there was something about the Saints that made them beloved to immigrants: I'll not forget going to a Saints vs Blues match once with 4 belgians, the Finn and one other Aussie, and only the locals were barracking for Carlton.

But I digress. Again.

Apart from the great Nicky Winmar, who was a genius on the field, and off-field both an advocate for Aboriginal rights and, often, a 'messed up bloke' (Mikko's greatest heroes were always people who were battling adversity - witness the late great Hunter S Thomson - and he both admired, feared and wanted to emulate them), Mikko's other St Kilda hero was the club's elder statesman, Robert Harvey. Sometime captain, dual Brownlow medallist, a veteran of 383 games over 21 years, 'Harves' has seen everything but a premiership cup.

The lads gave everything to get him one this year: at 37, he didn't have another season in him; but after winning the pre-season NAB Cup, running a typically up and down season, then surging into the top four in the last week before the finals, they fell at the last hurdle to Hawthorn, who at least went on to win on Grand Final day. There's no shame to losing to the top side all season, but I know Mikko would have been bitterly disappointed at the result.

Maybe today's news would have brought a smile: Harves has been voted by his peers throughout the AFL (and a big margin!) as the AFL Players Association Madden Medallist: an award established in 2007 to recognise the game's greats in the year of their retirement from playing. Couldn't have happened to a nicer bloke.

Harves has now joined my beloved Bluebaggers as Development coach, and I somehow don't think the Finn would mind me now sharing his favourite. When our teams played each other we could hardly stand to be in the same house, much less go to the game together (one of us always ended up sulking, no matter how generous the winner was), but when our teams played someone else, we always knew who we were barracking for!

Epiphany at Salisbury

Readers of my other blog will know that this week has also been peppered with visitors from home - always something of a double-edged sword, because invariably we (okay, 'I') end up talking abot Mikko, and often I end up in uncontrollable tears and feelign like a goose the next day. So I was wary of that. Especially this week, of all weeks.

As part of our adventures, after visiting stonehenge I took Rod and Lissy to Salisbury cathedral, to see the Magna Carta (the political geek in me stands in awe of how much this document shaped England for centuries to come, and just how much we owe William Marshall and is peers, for their contribution to democracy. But I digress).

I will always remember Mikko's delight at discovering the born traveller - the "citizen of the world" - within me. I know now for myself how exciting it is, showing people around and seeing their faces light up, knowing that I looked exactly the same when I first saw the same things. And I understand that look he used to give me, because now I 'pass it forward' too.

Anyway, I had a moment of a very different sort in Salisbury Cathedral.

Despite being 'no longer particularly christian', Mikko always used to light candles for people in cathedrals - all over europe, in memory.

So I light one for him - wherever I go. So I'm headed up to the chapel behind the altar, usually 'the lady chapel', trying to make sure Rod neither sees nor hears me crying. Suddenly I realise that the particular shriney thing before me is actually a memorial for prisoners of conscience... So of course that got me thinking about all discussions we all used to have about human rights and giving something back.

It reminded me that all the Mandelas and Bettancourts and other people who aren't allowed to say what they think have, at times, had to rely on nothing more than love and warm memories to get through much tougher times than anything I have to face. And that helped. A lot. So now I don't feel nearly so lonely this week.

Remembering the finn

Four years on, and today it feels like nothing has really changed in the year since I wrote this piece.

I've had counselling, I've fallen in a heap, I've been to the unit we set up with his bequest. I've silently raged against people who, in their grief, have behaved in ways that I would have been ashamed of - but who am I to judge anyway.

I've tried to focus on the positive, to resolve the grief and the anger and the sheer bloody waste of a life. I sometimes wish I could hate him for throwing it away - but I stopped being angry with him a long time before he died.

None of it changes the fact that I still miss Mikko. Daily.

Bush don't live there anymore...

I can think of no-one who would be dancing harder over Obama's win over McCain in the UK Presidential race. It's long overdue - and the jokes have already started.

One sunny day late in January 2009, an old man approached the White House from Across Pennsylvania Avenue, where he'd been sitting on a park bench.

He spoke to the U.S. Marine standing guard and said, 'I would like to go in and meet with President Bush.'

The Marine looked at the man and said, 'Sir, Mr. Bush is no longer president and no longer resides here.'

The old man said, 'Okay' and walked away.

The following day, the same man approached the White House and said to the same Marine, 'I would like to go in and meet with President Bush.'

The Marine again told the man, 'Sir, as I said yesterday, Mr. Bush is no longer president and no longer resides here.'

The man thanked him and, again, just walked away.

The third day, the same man approached the White House and spoke to the very same U.S. Marine, saying 'I would like to go in and meet with President Bush.'

The Marine, understandably agitated at this point, looked at the man and said, 'Sir, this is the third day in a row you have been here asking to speak to Mr. Bush. I've told you already that Mr. Bush is no longer the president and no longer resides here. Don't you understand?'

The old man looked at the Marine and said, 'Oh, I understand. I just love hearing it.'

The Marine snapped to attention, saluted, and said, 'See you tomorrow, Sir.'

End of an era - thanks for the memories Pat

Last week saw the end of an era end at the Dan O'Connell in Melbourne. For the past 15 years or more, the Sunday afternoon 'spot', 4pm-7pm, has belonged to Pat McKernan, an Irish expat who has found a home away from home in Melbourne's pubs. Pat's ability to generate a whole lot of sound and vibe from one man and a guitar has made him a stalwart on the Irish live music scene in my home town.

But last Sunday was his last ever at the Dan, bringing to an end more than a decade of memories: Pat McKernan followed by Erins Pride followed by the first of a million kisses, Pat playing at Mikko's and my wedding, Pat on St Pat's day, Pat in countless Hundred Pint club photos. Pat followed by the Sunday singing session, which kept me sane in the months after Mikko died. Chaals always said his ambition was to one day have learned as many songs as Pat knew - I often thought of that as I diligently learned two new songs a week for the session...

Pat's versions of Sally McLannan, the Parting Glass, the Fields of Athenrye and loads others are still the ones I know and sing. And, of course, then there's his own piece - 'Geraldine's thinking of Galway', a song of such homesickness that Mikko would ask me never to sing it when he was within earshot...

There are piccies on facebook.

Mikkon syntymäpäivää

Mikko blamed a helluva lot on being a gemini. He revelled in having similarly-mad-cap gemini friends (although he did concede that we aquarians are the nutcase inventors of the Zodiac), and despaired occasionally that his birthday, which fell at the start of summer each year back in finland, was in Melbourne cloaked with grey and chilly 'brrrr'.

Mikko's birthdays usually meant a gorgeous dinner out somewhere (one at Toofey's springs to mind where I tasted my first Margaux,and Paris Go), and drinks with mates (the night at Dante's, where Glennee met my mum for the first time and, not knowing she was my mum, demanded I give him her phone number, was a classic).

His 30th in Hong Kong remains one of the most 'extremes of everything' trips ever: god and mammon; tradition and consumerism; honour and contempt; privilege and abuse; rampant pollution and the best king prawns I ever tasted.

The sense of occasion, however, never waivered. I was never good at throwing parties or hosting gatherings, Mikko revelled in them.

This year, he would have been 36. I marked it with Khrystene, who just so happened to be visting from Poland this weekend. We didn't plan it that way, but obviously, it was supposed to happen.

Hyvää syntymäpäivää Mikko.

Beyond the Iron curtain...

Readers of my other blog will know that Ants and I are not long back from a medieval tournament in Lithuania. It wasn't til after we arrived that the penny dropped for Anthony that we were standing behind the 'iron curtain' of the 20th century, inside a former Soviet country. It hadn't occurred to me that, other than my travels in Berlin, it was my first time too.

Mikko's experiences of growing up in a first world country, but just a stone's throw from the Soviets, fundamentally shaped his outlook on the world. From Helsinki to St Petersburg is about 200 kilometres as the crow flies, he often said, and Helsinki kids in the'80s knew that if the west bombed Moscow, St Petersburg would be second, and then Helsinki would have about 20 minutes before it became dust and ash. Where Aussie kids had fire drills in school, Finnish kids would practice going into the bomb shelter, but by his teens, Mikko wondered what the point was, because if they ever went in for real, they would eventually emerge to a barren, toxic world that would only kill them slowly.

I lost count of the late night conversations where he'd tell and retell about the letters his class wrote year after year to Mr Reagan and Mr Kruschev, and later Mr Gorbachev, saying 'please don't kill us with your war. We're just kids in Finland, and we want to grow up to be big, and that won't happen if you drop the bomb'.

About the day he and his parents were driving somewhere, and Reagan's immortal soundcheck gaffe brought traffic to a standstill: "My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes". Wikipedia says the quote was never broadcast, but Mikko remembers it differently.

And about the sense of hope he says he and his friends felt when Romanians staged their massive non-violence demonstration, banging tin pots for hours on end in the square; and then Lithuania and other countries declared independence, and the Wall in Berlin finally came down, piece by piece. "I was 18 years old and for the first time I thought I might grow to be an old man".

Most sadly of all, I remember how that confidence evaporated in the months after September 11, 2001, as religious fundamentalism rose to take the place that had been held by political fundamentalism the century before.

It was against Western Christian imperialism, as much as any physical invasion, that he marched when he joined hundreds of thousands on Melbourne's streets during 2001 and 2002, to protest the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and later Iraq, both supported by the Howard Government and detested by my favourite leftie.

As our activism grew, he later protested that I'd usurped his ideology. I prefer to think that he inspired me to stand up for the things I had always known were right, even when it meant stepping outside the structures I knew and felt comfortable with. He always respected where I was coming from, while challenging me to constantly evaluate whether where I'd been was still where I was going.

To you, Mikko, I owe my involvement with the Peace Brigades, the National Environment Conference of 2001, the benefit gigs at Trades hall, countless books I read, workshops I ran and speeches I gave. You led me to put my money where my mouth was start my Masters (to say nothing of the late night shop runs you made to bring me caffeine, cigarettes and chocolate!). With you, I left the Liberals, and joined the Greens.

You were my sounding board and debating partner, my bedrock and my inspiration. If there's any way that you can still look in on this world from time to time, I hope that you get a giggle from the ways in which politics and re-enactment have fused themselves together in my world here in Europe: from the Lithuanian experience to the medieval fundraising feast we cooked for the Green Party. I hope it helps you (as it helps me) to know that I've made this stuff my own and continue to carry it forward to new friends and folk I love. And I hope that what you see might make you proud. Because I don't believe you had any idea just how profound an influence you have had on so many people.

A quiet visit to a special place...

Three years of effort came to fruition today. The Mikko Sikstrom Memorial Fund was set up in early 2005 with the proceeds of Mikko's estate, in conjunction with the Leukaemia Foundation, for whom Mikko shaved his head and raised nearly a thousand dollars in the months before his death.

Mikko's fund was to be put towards the purchase of a unit that leukaemia patients and their families could stay in when they had to travel to Melbourne from far away for their treatment. For the man whose first home in Australia was the remote hamlet of Mallacoota, 7 hours drive from the city, it has always seemed a very fitting way to honour his altruism and his beginnings here.

Finding additional funds and the right premises took time, but in October last year the unit was opened and received its first residents.

Mikko's parents, in their wisdom - or whatever - decided not to share this news with even his closest friends and family in Australia, so none of us was able to go, but such a milestone was never going to stay secret forever, and today, Mikko's friend Ned and I met LF representatives in East Melbourne for a short tour.

Mikko's inner city soul would revel in the location, an old brewery opposite the Fitzroy Gardens just minutes from town and - most importantly for residents - the hospital. His eye for groovy detail would adore the compact and crafty design, done in that way that usually only Europeans do so well, and the funky modern decor in chocolate brown and cream, with bright prints on the walls.

We were there just a few minutes, chatting briefly with the man from Deniliquin (some 500kms away) who, after 3 months of treatment, would next week go home well, and his wife who has been able to be at his side throughout, thanks to this place. It was enough.

Ned and I went for a quiet one at Dante's to salute what we'd seen, catch up on one another's news and silently toast our absent but still much loved friend.

In the two years since I left Melbourne I have often felt a sense of relief at being able to escape the memories, people and places that pervade every inner suburb of my home town and the sorrow that has tinted the lives of everyone I hold dear.

Moving to a new space has helped me learn to live with my grief in ways I think I wouldn't have if I'd stayed. And it's enabled Anthony and I to grow into our shared life out from under Mikko's sometimes formiddable shadow.

The last time I came home I confronted endless agonies in every turn, every street, and still in the faces of so many friends. This time it's different. Mikko is still missed - often sorely, and not least by me - but Melbourne is finally becoming a place where I can do more than merely mourn that he is lost. In every cafe and bar, in gardens and by riverbanks, on trams and in sports grounds, in sunshine and in rain, I can celebrate that he lived. I can help keep the best of him here in the world, long after he has left it.

And Melbourne feels more like home than it has in years.

Apology to the Stolen Generations

On 12 February, 2008, in the words of one facebooker "a brave man walked into Federal Parliament. Two hours later, a great man walked out." I couldn't help wondering what Mikko would have made of that day. Part of him would have been proud, I think, that his adopted country was finally redressing old wrongs, although he would also be adamant that Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's apology to the stolen generations was long overdue: after all Mikko signed this petition in 1999, and for nearly a decade kept this photo of Nicky Winmar "lifitng his jumper and pointing to his tummy" on his wall. Australians have a lot to learn from other countries' treatment of indigenous people: including Finland's respect for the traditional ways of life of the Saami people (in English, we know them as Laplanders). Nevertheless, I was proud to be an Australian that day, and I think the Finn would have been proud too.

The Mikko Sikstrom Memorial Fund

Okay, so this is coming late, and somewhat out of the blue for some folk... some of you may recall that after Mikko's death, in consultation with Matti and Meri, a sum of money (some $66,000, approximately 40,000 euro) was donated to the Leukaemia Foundation of Victoria. This is the organisation for which Mikko shaved off his hair to raise money in early 2004 (see before and after pix, below), in their annual "shave for a cure" campaign. During his life he raised about $1000 (600 euro). We thought long and hard about appropriate ways to perpetuate his generous spirit, and honouring this very positive aspect of his life seemed to be the most appropriate. We hope that you agree.

In memory of Mikko's beginnings in Australia, at Mallacoota in the far east of Victoria (600 km Melbournesta), these funds were allocated to the purchase of a residential unit so that people suffering from leukaemia could have a home away from home when they needed to travel to Melbourne for treatment, and be surrounded by family and familiar things at such a scary time. This is actually the first property of its kind that the Leukaemia Foundation has ever funded in Melbourne, and this is something of which we can all be proud. Finding an appropriate property has taken a very long time, and in the end our fund has been combined with others in order to provide an appropriate premises. However the purchase has now been made, and you can read about the recent opening ceremony here: http://www.leukaemia.org.au/fileadmin/dl-docs/booklets/Carer_Autumn08.pdf

I am hoping to see the unit when I return to Melbourne for a visit during May, and hope to have more news for you then if you wish it.

A little bit about me

Okay, so if you're reading this and know who Mikko was, you know who I was.

When he died, one of the hardest things for me to figure out was what I was supposed to be going forward. Mikko was my first husband, and I can say (with no disrespect to Anthony, with whom I now share my life) that I will never love anyone with the intensity and ferocity and sometimes-all-consuming-desperation that I have felt for "the Finn".

At the time he died, that marriage had ended in practice, although it endured in a legal sense. In daily life, Mikko had become the friend I saw more often than any other, who ran a late night bottle-o around the corner from my home in Carlton, who rang me three times a week to go for pizza, a glass of wine, a movie, a chat. He was the bloke I'd swing past to see when I needed a break from writing my final papers for my masters, and who rang me in those final weeks to say 'there's a new publican at Dan, and he's proper Irish. We gotta go - it's gonna be great again'. We still fought at swordfighting training and traded tales of our respective romantic adventures. He was the bloke who would walk me home and still have awkward moments, because sometimes each of us would forget that we weren't in a marriage any more, and 'nearly' hold hands, or kiss.

Whatever he and I had become, he was my best friend, and I miss him. I know I'm not the only one and my grief is, in many ways, no different to anyone else's. But he continues to dominate my thoughts. So much. So often.

I spent most of 2005 in a state that I can only describe as 'never very far from tears'. In 2006 I moved to the UK, found peace and a new level of reconciliation in our beloved Wien, finally saw Helsinki in the summer, and learned what it is to exist long hours from the place your heart calls home. Even now, three years on and still living 10,000 miles from Melbourne, surrounded by people who never met him, it often takes but a moment and an unwitting word to conjure up memories of happy days, or gutwrenching confrontations, and always that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach when I'm reminded that he's not just 'not here' in Oxford, he's 'gone'. Hot tears flow thick and fast when I'm alone - on a bus, or by the Thames, or under my doona at night...

I'm trying, with all my heart and soul, to make this blog a record of the thousands of ways in which he changed the world for the better. If it inspires one person, or changes one life, I'll be pleased.

Invariably, sometimes it's just gonna be about the loneliness, which I live with nearly every day. But what can you do? If any of us gives in and follows him, all we do is prove him right. And it will never be all right with me that Mikko found this world such an awful and terrifying place that he had to take himself from it.

You were bright and brilliant - and right about many things, rakas Mikko. But leaving the world was not one of them. I hope that, wherever you are, you know that now, even though these days you're in a place where it no longer matters.

aina,
Gigisi

A little bit about this blog

If you are reading this blog, you've either found it by accident, or like me, you still sometimes randomly google the name of someone we all loved and lost because you find it hard to believe, even after nearly 4 years, that he really isn't here.

It seems impossible that someone who touched as many lives as Mikko did, and who changed so many people for the better, could leave such a little dent in cyberspace. Creating this blog isn't supposed to exactly remedy that, and it isn't supposed to become some kind of shrine, just a way of keeping some of the best of him in the world. I think that sometimes what I find hardest about him being no longer here is that there's so damn much he's missing out on: from the huge world events (he would have been flattered, I think, to know that he shared an obituary page with Yasser Arafat, but desperate at more recent turns of events between Israeli and Palestinian forces, and the ongoing occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan) to the celebrations of his friends: the degrees awarded, babies born, new partners, new jobs, new countries we call home.

I hope that anyone who wants to will share thoughts and memories, the things that fill you with a warm glow because you know he would be so proud to know the things you've done, and maybe even a little about the days that still sometimes ache so much.

My grandfather used to say that no-one is truly dead while even the last person in the world who knew and loved and remembered them is still here. I like to think that I prove him right every time I tell someone that.