As New Year’s Eve approached I got increasingly desperate. An old friend had a party coming up. I’d see all the people who’re in Finland only for the holidays. It’d be very comfortable and incestuous.

My brother was feeling much the same. He’s been living abroad so long he didn’t have a party lined up at all, and came up with the idea to call an old school mate I have from way back in junior high. He’d since been accepted to study in the Helsinki Academy of Art and Design. Me and my brother, we both applied and both left Finland for greener pastures when we were rejected. So I called my old school mate and asked him if he had a school party for New Year. We wanted to get to know some of these art people in Finland. It does no good if all of your contacts are in Paris.

I made a resolution to stay relatively sober. I can’t remember any particular moment when I would have abandoned it, so I’ll have to chalk our behavior up to brotherly hysteria. The party was very nice, in a suburban house inhabited by eight art, theatre or film student girls.

Highlights of the evening included the guy who attempted to steal our booze. We were coming back to make some GTs when my brother spotted a familiar plastic bag disappearing into the crowd, borne by a guy we’d been talking to just now. My brother plunged after him and managed to get our gin back. The guy attempted to explain that he’d thought we had left and had wanted to rescue our booze in case some greedy soul were to steal it. We assured him that next time, we’d look after his booze in a similarly neighbourly fashion.

We made some friends by distributing strange balsam from Latvia, and I attempted to chat up a nice-looking, Iranian-born producer student girl. Unfortunately my generally successful porn art anecdotes fell flat, and it turned out that she was into children’s movies. I remember another girl from later in the night who had been travelling in Iceland, Faroe Islands, Greenland and New Zealand, and with whom I hit it off rather nicely, but later I lost her in the crowd. Even later I have vague memories of employing such classic pick-up lines as: “You look like Charlotte Rampling in the Night Porter” and “Are you Jewish?”.

In my defense I say that the girl was quite beautiful and indeed did look like Charlotte Rampling.

Around that time I started going around with my brother threatening to beat up all the directing students we found. We may have to practise this, because it seemed that we failed to sow fear into the hearts of our victims.

We got fed up around three or four in the night. We tried to get a taxi, but ended up running after a couple who left the house looking like they knew where they were going. They did, and soon we were in a taxi headed back to the center of Helsinki.

I ended up in my friend’s party. It had reached its latter stages, and soon I left with some old friends to an afterparty in Kallio. By that time it was fortunately morning already, so getting a taxi was not a problem.

I started walking home (a distance of only a few blocks, fortunately) around ten thirty in the morning. The sky was overcast, it was very light, and there were no people around. The diffuse, bright morning light and my elevated mental state made the city seem hyperreal, artificial and hallucinatory.

In retrospect, I think the high point of the night was when we were looking for the taxi from the first party, and in the lobby of the house we met a girl who seemed sober and determined. My brother asked her if she had a car. She said yes. My brother asked her to drive us to the center. She said she was too drunk. My brother offered her money, and she declined. My brother offered to fuck her, and she started laughing so hard, she almost doubled up on the floor.

It was nice to know that we were not alone in our advanced state of hysteria.