Building a Rainbow - part 3

The next morning we telephoned the TV station and managed to wheedle out of them the telephone number of the Company in Finland. Thank heavens they spoke English when we called!
In no time at all - and without giving too much thought to the consequences - we were off to Helsinki.
We flew from Toulouse via Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport and with only forty minutes between flights, we anticipated delays, problems and perhaps a night in Amsterdam en route. Remarkably all went smoothly and we arrived in Helsinki late by our time clock but in good time for our first experience of that strange northern summer phenomenon of an almost, but not quite, twilight.
We had to buy a small travelling alarm clock. Graham cat, whose color lives up to his name, is our usual alarm clock. He has the rather anti-social habit of waking us by sucking hungrily at any piece of exposed flesh, never having completely forgotten the experience of abandonment as a tiny kitten in a plastic carrier bag at the side of a French country road. If these assaults do not have the desired effect, i.e. of persuading us to get out of bed and produce food, Graham will be followed by Molly, a large and very heavy tortoiseshell who has a habit of pinning you down whilst purring loudly two inches from your face. Although possessing the cantankerous disposition often found in tortoiseshells, Molly has an unassailable place in the household, being a legacy from a much-loved daughter who died much too young of cancer. We actually had six cats at this time, an admission which usually invited looks of horror from most people. We hadn’t set out to acquire this many and the supermarket bills horrified us too at times – cats eat more as a percentage of their body weight than just about any other domestic animal. We also had a dog and aspirations after we had settled in our meadow, for further and more productive animal additions in the shape of a couple of nanny goats and a clutch of chickens to complement our hoped-for eco lifestyle.