Today's sights

Walking to the bus stop, about 4.30pm in suburban Maunula. The Irishman and I round the corner behind my local shopping centre and facing us is the local drunk, shrivelled member doing what it does best when full of olut, broad daylight, traffic passing. I look away immediately. The Irishman tells me that the man didn't even blink recognition of humiliation, more that we had interrupted him.

Next to his toilet, two phone books sit happily, unchained, not glassed in, on an open phone booth. They have not been graffitied, stolen or burnt as in other countries I have lived in. Maunula residents may piss on the streets but at least the phone books are safe.

Coming home, midnight, a woman stumbles onto the bus, her legs are dripping with blood, red blood from fresh cuts where she has fallen and scraped her knees or cut them on glass. She takes ages to sit down. Drunk as she probably is, she is clearly wounded. No one asks how she is, including me, using language as an excuse.