Moomins on the Mind

Pumpkin pie -- oh yes!
(Sunday's breakfast was a pork taco, which I gobbled so fast I failed to photograph)

One of the stranger episodes in a life punctuated by oddities, was the bleary-eyed, jet-lagged fuzzy afternoon (morning? evening? it's hard to say) I spent at Helsinki airport: a place that was teaming with Moomins. It was five-hour layover between Delhi and London.

It's my only brush with Finland; and I remember being hungry, and tired and beset by Moomins at every turn: creatures that I have always found just the tiniest bit -- whisper it -- sinister. (This is to say nothing of Little My, who is profoundly unsettling.)

I do not recommend that a person short on sleep, and rich in overactive imaginings spend any time surrounded my Moomin figures of every size and form -- soft, hard, edible, two-dimensional, three-dimensional. It is the sort of experience that lodges itself, indelibly in the mind, and creeps unbound into one's consciousness from time to time, a half-remembered waking nightmare of blank expressioned, moon-faced beings lunging at you out of nowhere, their round, eyes unblinking and emotionless. Like right now, in fact: my mind is awhirl with Moomins.