‘Well, ’cause I lost the wrestling match,’ he answered. ‘That’s all I can say.’

My friend Hamish MacKay,

Greetings from Kyoto; I decided to go on a little trip.

The building works seemed to be getting on fine without me, and I was beginning to get fed up with the pot holders. My brother, who was ill all summer, is feeling a bit better now and is back at work. My niece goes to school by bus now, on her own, so I thought it safe to go away for a while.

The card shows a park I visited yesterday. The tea I had to drink there was over a hundred years old. Can you imagine!

I hope you are well. Perhaps you have written during my absence and a letter awaits me at home.

Regards from your friend Annu

Dear Mr MacKay,

These are the boats they use to fish with in Okinawa! I ate lobster yesterday, and when I saw this card on a stand, I decided to send it to you. I wonder if your letter has got lost in the post; my brother said on the phone that no letter has arrived.

Warm wishes,
Annu

My dear friend,

The first snow has fallen in Finland. It is equally magi-cal every time. Now everything is clean and white, the evenings don’t feel dark and all the unfinished jobs in the garden have been mercifully covered by snow. We shall have to see how long the snow will stay. They have forecast milder weather for next week, which here in the south means a return to slush and darkness. I never got round to tidying the edges of the sand path before the end of autumn, damn it. It takes several days to straighten them with a spade. But what can you do? A lawnmower is no good for that job.

In The New York Times they gave out on the aeroplane I found the story of Tom Sanders. I was going to send you the whole cutting but I may have accidentally made a compost bag out of it. I record the story here as I remember it.

THE EARTH SWALLOWED UP A SLEEPING MAN

28.2.2013, Florida (if I remember rightly). Tom Sanders went to bed at night, as usual. His wife was working the night shift and the children were asleep in their rooms, upstairs from their parents’. At 2.14 a.m., the ground under Tom Sanders’s house unexpectedly gave way. A ten-metre chasm opened up, drawing in the bedroom floor, along with the room’s sleeping occupant, Tom Sanders.

The children ran downstairs and saw that half of the bottom floor of the house was missing. The neighbours alerted the authorities, who managed to rescue the children from the stairs. The search for Tom Sanders, who had been swallowed up by the ground, began immediately. The family hoped he was caught in a kind of air pocket.