Blast from the Past

Today in the music room of the Helsinki Cathedral's parish quarters in Meritulli, where I've been going to continuously since 1993 - it's also the headquarters of Cantores Minores - I stumbled upon some papers which were strown on top of an ancient harpsichord in a messy corner. Absent-mindedly, I picked up the topmost paper and realised it was a list someone had compiled of the choir's second sopranos who were present at a rehearsal.

My very first thought was that somebody has been really careless, just using a piece of sheet music to scribble a list of names on the back and then losing the paper. Then I had a look at the date: 7.12.1995. When I took a better look at the messy scribbles I suddenly realised the handwriting was hauntingly familiar.

An image suddenly flashed in my mind of a certain choir rehearsal ages ago, when the prefect of the second sopranos was sick and asked me to write down the names of the people present, and when I realised I was staring at that very same list, I almost laughed out loud. That piece of paper has been lying on top of the harpsichord for ten and a half years, almost as if it was waiting for me to pick it up and blast me back to when I was eleven years old and still wrote everything in block letters. Needless to say, I took the paper with me.

Today I rode on the back of a bike for the first time ever (at least according to my memory) when Jarno and I sped from Meritulli to Temppeliaukion kirkko through downtown to listen to a concert of the Helsinki Chamber Choir (previously known as the Finnish Radio Chamber Choir, before the radio decided nobody is interested in choral music anyway). The concert was an exciting experience (music by twentieth-century Finnish-Swedish composers), but not as exciting as the ride on the back of the bike.