The great annual barbecue (we have now done it two years in a row, so it's practically a Lionbridge tradition) was almost shot in the head before it began. Warnings of unpleasant weather seemed to have been an understatement, and the idyllic summer sunshine of the Night of the Arts 2008 seemed a distant-arsed dream. Lightning, thunder and pelting rain abounded just an hour before we were due to turn up at Mustikkamaa, but the dauntless barbecue-goers of the Technical Writing department had no intention of flinching in the face of God's wrath, no sir! We had free shit to consume!

 

The pictures are presented in no particular chronological order.

 

 

 

I received a lift to the site, together with Wendy and four bags of sausages, booze and chicken wings, by the graceful offer of Auri, who you would never guess was an ancient and terrible Trantex dinosaur resurrected using morally questionable scientific processes by Lionbridge R&D. I mean, to look at her. You'd be surprised. Anyway, she gave us a lift and proved an excellent addition to the Mustikkamaa barbecue posse for this and many other reasons. The ride out to "the Must" was epic, and more than a little hair-raising due to the fact that the window de-fogger was not operating very well and politeness denied me the opportunity to break into the beer carton during the journey in order to dull the edges of my terror. The second leg of the trip was a trek from the Korkeasaari carpark around the coast of the island. We picked up Anna along the way as we passed by the zoo bus stop, which was great because until her appearance, I was the only person who had been to the place before and was clearly expected to act as a navigator accordingly. Boy, they were way off.

 

Still, we found the place in the end, thanks to Anna's map and a whole lot of vaguely-hopeful comments like "it's a small island, by the time we go all the way around it we'll have to find the barbecues." We arrived to find that the weather, which had been mostly-invisible to us from inside the car, had improved dramatically in the past hour and was now merely grey, humid and soggy rather than thunderous and cats-and-dogsian.

 

We also arrived to find that nobody was there with their kid, nobody had prepared for our arrival by setting the fire and getting it lit, and nobody had opted to spend some precious hours of their remaining summer holiday time to meet and greet with the peons. I began to set out our first round of sausages on the apparently busted grill. Nobody was derisive and unhelpful with regards to my attempts to fix things, more or less as expected. There was a certain amount of tension when Auri accused me of putting a piece of wood into the fire "the wrong way around", but it was diplomatically defused by the clarification that she was talking about the sausages on the grill, not the wood at all. Thus mollified, I continued to try to cook on a grill tilted at an angle of 35°, thirty or forty centimetres away from the actual fire.

 

Discussion turned to who else was coming, and I was halfway through my description of Hanna's uncertainty and sleep-deprived lack of confidence in ever finding the place when, to my surprise, she appeared. Mr. Farenheit also turned up around this time, and barbecuing duly commenced. Mr. Farenheit opted not to reprise his role as the Steakinator this year, leaving it in my capable hands. He also remembered that the grill had been busted last year as well, and that we had pulled it aside and barbecued directly on the catching-tray. So we did that again this year. Nobody claimed to have told me exactly the same thing, which was just a stinking lie.

 

Drinking also commenced. Nobody went for a jaunt around the beach with the kid, returning with a lump of seaweed on a rock as a conversation piece. It was suggested that the lump of seaweed on a rock could be our new global department manager. It was also generally agreed that Mr. Farenheit put it on his head and pose for photos, thus earning the rock with seaweed in an honoured place in the Mr. Farenheit Hall of Things I Put On My Head And Posed For Photos. The resemblance to a troll doll was initially quite clear, but faded with time. He also placed the rock under his chin as a hilarious beard. I don't know if he has a Hall for those.

 

 

Time went by. The packets of sausages dwindled, the steaks were a mild disappointment, the weather continued relatively pleasant. Nobody left. People began to wonder whether or not Antti would actually turn up. Hanna had a momentary panic attack when she thought we meant a different Antti to the one we really did mean. Mr. Farenheit assured us that Antti was coming, but would be excessively late due to a combination of work and public transport factors that I for one found highly questionable. For a moment it seemed like Antti, too, would appear the moment we started talking about his presence, but it turned out to be a female jogger. And then an old man. And then another female jogger, and then a dog. The thing about Antti is, he's so easily mistaken for any number of other things that aren't Antti.

 

Finally, though, he did show up, with some cock-and-bull story about an engineer keeping him waiting for documentation information and then forgetting he was there, as if that ever happens to Technical Writers. He then compounded his folly by making up some astonishing fairy-tale about the train being late. We forgave him for his colourful imagination, opened more sausages and began round two of the barbecuing. Hanna graced the grill with her turkey-veggie weiners, which became quite the party piece later in the evening (in the most innocent of ways) but sadly we don't have photos of that. The chicken wings also came out, and proved to be a hit.

 

Auri provided bacon-wrapped mushrooms filled with blue cheese, which I assume were nice ("Yay, it's the smallest one," Mr. Farenheit was heard to remark when his share of the delicacies were deposited on his plate). The general consensus seemed to be that all the nicest stuff had been brought along out of the attendees' own wallets, which was harsh but fair. The mass quantities of sausage and free booze were, however, greatly valued, and Wendy went on the official record as stating, via her spokesman Mr. Farenheit, that the blacker the sausage, the better.

 

On that note ... I think it was well before this point that Anna began to bombard us with her patented Anna-uendoes, combining them with bad puns because Janne Keskisaari wasn't present this year to carry the torch. But they grew steadily more blatant in their disregard of the Geneva Convention for Treatment of Language-Related Humour, and she was enthusiastically assisted in her crimes by a number of other people. This is what happens when Technical Writers go bad.

 

Time went on. Wendy left, instructing us to call her if we ended up in a bar. This seemed unlikely, but we promised, as we always do, to track her down somehow after she pulls one of her disappearing acts. Auri left too, generously upending her cornucopia of, uh, corn onto the barbecue and leaving it with us to enjoy. And we did.

 

Time continued to pass. The carton was duly emptied, as were the bottles brought along by others. I was derelict in my duty this year, in that I neglected to bring Minttu along for the enjoyment of the few. I knocked the plastic forks on the ground an inordinate number of times before giving up on them amidst "fork"-based puns that simply do not bear repeating. Hanna finished her turkey-veg weiners and departed victorious. At some point around here, we were joined by a couple of people who were scouting out the area in preparation for a birthday celebration the following day. They failed to score any free food or beer from us, and we failed to score invitations to the birthday party. I think mainly they were worried that we were still going to be there the following afternoon. By that stage, we all looked pretty comfortable and the barbecue area looked pretty lived-in..

 

Mr. Farenheit also graced us with the Beer Can Arts, achieving the Full Hellboy for the first time in my own personal experience, and recorded by cameras for one of the first times in history.

 

 

He thanked the academy for the faith it had placed in him, and put his success down to the increase in head-fat he had gained during his summer holiday, which greatly assisted in the creation of the required can-forehead vacuum.

 

 

 

In the end, Antti and Anna and Mr. Farenheit and I declared the night won, and packed our things. The fire was doused with a combination of water and Sprite Zero, which is like water with some bubbles and no more (or less) suited to dousing a fire than it is to drinking, and the leftover sodas were donated to Mr. Farenheit's Soda Saturday Foundation. Rumour has it that he soda'd, and soda'd good, on that particular Soda Saturday.

 

We walked for the metro station to find it had already performed its last run for the night, which makes sense given that nobody wants to go anywhere at eleven o'clock on Friday fucking night.

 

 

After waiting for a while we decided that we should take the bus, which thanks to our dithering was just minutes from departure. Somewhere. We struck out for the bus stop, full of hope and accompanied by a skinny-arsed teenage kid who I was sure hadn't been at the Must. If he had, I would've given him one of my steaks.

 

By the time Antti, The Kid and I got to the bus station and realised the buses were all going in the wrong direction and we wanted to be on the other side of the freeway, the nearest crossing of which was several hundred kilometres away, we had already missed the bus into town. Anna and Mr. Farenheit had presumably already realised this, because they'd turned back and we had failed to hear their shouts as they did so. They were gone. Antti, The Kid and I returned to the other side of the Freeway, and after many weeks of agonised trudging found a strangely deserted bus stop with a taxi-van parked nearby.

 

The taxi driver was enjoying a cup of coffee and a chat with a friend when we stumbled up and asked him if he was booked. He asked us where we were headed, and when we said "Helsinki" he said, "what a coincidence, I'm going that way too."

 

The strange and surreal taxi ride got us as far as Sörnäinen before Antti got out to go and attend some sort of concert, and I realised this was as far out of my way as I wanted to go as well. I gave The Kid some money for the rest of the taxi trip into town, and that was where we parted ways. Antti handed me the huge bag of empty cans (he was going to throw them away, but I have this cunning way of getting money for them at supermarkets) and headed for his concert and I, having missed the bus yet again, got another taxi out of there.

 

On the way home, my taxi overtook the bus but I was too tired to hang my arse out the window at it.

 

The end.