Lest THEY forget...

Remembrance day is, of course, always a poignant day for all who love Mikko. Lest we forget, and all that.

It seems the French at Villers-Bretonneux have even longer memories. At the end of World War I, according to The Age, Victorian schoolchildren donated money to rebuild the school of the town, taken from the Germans by Australian soldiers on 24 April 1918, at the cost of 1200 Australian lives.

Now the French have returned the favour: after hearing about Black Saturday, the mayor and city are donating money to rebuild a school somewhere in Australia.

I can hear jubilance in Mikko's laugh even as I type this. It's gestures like these that gave him hope for the world: hope for humanity, hope for romance, hope for his vision of a life in which it might be truly possible to be a 'citizen of the world'.

My hope springs eternal. This is why I continue to honour him - this is what he taught me - this life of hope is the life I choose.

The World's Fastest Indian

Friend of mine reminded me recently of this film, which I saw at its opening night IN Invercargill. I cant see the film without crying... the wide roads and 50s suburban streetscapes... wow. Anthony Hopkins. And Burt Munro. My father in law's grandfather used to race with him - this crazy old guy who lived in a shed on a suburban block and just loved to ride bikes really fast and to flirt with the ladies, even when he was long past pensionable age. So there's two blokes Mikko would have wanted to be, if he'd made it to 68, and "evil uncle Mikko" status...

World's best hangover brekkie

Once upon a time, back in the days when it wasn't really Saturday unless it started with a hangover, Mikko and Georgi hauled their suffering bodies onto a flight to Canberra. We were flying with the matriarch and patriarch of 'Clan Colquhoun', and John and Jude were frankly horrified by our seediness. (Can't think why. Specially when I'm sure it was their wine the night before...)

Everything changed when we found the delightful 'Cafe Essen' in Civic, which served sweetcorn fritters with bacon and maple syrup. Sounds disgusting, you might think. I did. But the more I thought about it the better it sounded, and by the time I'd kept down a large glass of 'fat Coke' I was ready to try it.

To this day, it's the world's best brekkie for a hangover. Or any other Saturday, come to that. For years I despaired of ever being able to replicate it, until last year I found a recipe in a book in the Oxford library. And it works!

Far more than just my drinking habits have changed since those days, but today, apropos of nothing, I made the 'worlds best hangover brekkie' again, It was magnificent.
It put me in mind of hundreds of weekend breakfasts in Seymour and Abbotsford, Luxembourg, Finland, England and Austria, France and Belgium. I don't know anyone who does breakfast with as much aplomb as the Mikko did.

From sprawled on the floor devouring the weekend papers, to bottomless coffees with eggs benedict in some groovy cafe in Fitzroy, Collingwood or South Melbourne, breakfast was a Mikko morning ritual, an institution. Fry ups after a feast. Pancakes.

And that most memorable one of all, where he asked what I wanted for my birthday brekkie at his parents' house. Smoked salmon with scrambled eggs, please, I replied. My morning started with a glass of champagne, and an invitation to laze around under the doona until brekkie was ready.

Brekkie took quite some time.

After about an hour, a slightly flustered Mikko came up the stairs, apologising profusely cos he'd never actually made 'scrumbled' eggs before and he hadn't a clue where to start and did 'this' look vaguely right.

They were perfect, as was the salmon, the other glass of champagne, and our long wintry walk around the old Luxembourg Ville. Smoked Salmon and scrambled eggs is still my favourite brekkie for birthdays - although only once has the delivery ever even come close to that magical day when I turned 28.

Forever 32

I was 35 yesterday Finn.

Celebrated it in a style that I think you would have appreciated, with eaty-drinkie goodness at a proper 'free house' (independent pub) in the village where I work. Lunch was cooked by the landlord hisself, and his fresh food fetish gives the lie to English food being dodgy and stodgy (then again, Ollie the landlord is Irish). In between foodstuffs and conversations we played trivial pursuit, and soccer (I still can't call it football), and Aunt Sally (it's an oxfordshire thing - I'll explain another time), and there were guitars and singing. Ollie's other rare distinction is that he sells decent ciders and great wine, so we weren't all stuck with 'jars all round'.

It was a lot like the good old days at the Dan, where the pub felt 'just like your loungeroom. only bigger, to fit more of my friends in', or a bit like being away for a weekend in the country - but just for an afternoon. (Remember Puzz-3D in that amazing B&B we all stayed in after Ky and Paul's wedding? Like that.)

Afterwards got a bit messy, with second pub followed by whisky at a friend's place, then back to the pub. Hangover wasn't as bad as I deserved, but I was still relieved to have booked the day off work... So I reckon for 35 I'm doin' okay, well on track to ageing disgracefully.

I can't help thinking that you were always two years older than me, but today you're still 32.

I'm sorry you're not going to grow old with the rest of us. Liam sent me a text a while back that says 'even though you're not here, I can still share good times with you' (i suspect he's probably sent that message to your phone too, even though you don't answer it anymore)... You're missing out on a helluva lot - including another crackajack birthday.

Quote of the week

"A man drink like that and he don't eat - he is going to die"
- Blazing Saddles

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.