At some point Helsingin Sanomat and other newspapers published a series of interviews with CEOs, and it seemed that the interviewees’ hobbies were always pretty much the same. Typically the interviewees were men, and even when they were women they ran marathons, sailed, did climbing or decathlon, or something of the kind, as long as it ”tested you to the limit”. I was a CEO, so what was wrong with me? I had never felt the need to test my limits by doing extreme sports. I do sports, but only to stay healthy. I prefer to stretch my limits by reading across a range of writing– a reader’s decathlon, if you like.

If I had to be pigeonholed as a certain kind of person, I would probably opt for ‘reader and writer’. Reading is not a hobby for me, it's more a lifestyle. I never get into a mode of public transport or go on a trip without a good read: you have time to read plenty of things on a nine-minute train journey from Oulunkylä to central Helsinki. Apparently a number of people have even caught me reading on the metro escalators. I read Finnish and foreign literature, classics, fiction, crime fiction, biographies and history, travel writing and essays, memoirs and magazines, all kinds. Just something reasonable to read. If I couldn’t read, I would just dry up and blow away.

And it's more than likely that I would wither away if I couldn’t follow ballet and opera. I have been hooked for 40 years already, ever since I saw my first ballet performance, and now I sit watching it with a season ticket from year to year. To balance things out, I am a humble harness racing enthusiast, and have a subscription to Hevosurheilu magazine. For some reason, this hobby always raises the topic of perfume and meatballs; all grist to the mill for the humanist.

Quite apart from being a person who reads, I have also always been a person who writes. When I don’t find the time to vent this need of mine by writing research articles, I channel my writing passion into occasional reviews and sometimes longer popularised texts or short encyclopaedia articles. Producing texts is no problem, but cutting them down to size is invariably a pain.