“Where I quite like to be”

I’ve been trying to work out exactly what it is I find so magnetic about Finland. For a start, it’s cold: My freezer is cold, humming away at -18c to keep my pizzas crispy. In one Helsinki winter I’ve stumbled out of Urkki’s ^[1] into -26c. That really hardens your ice cubes, I can tell you. It’s also dark. Helsinki in midwinter gets less than six hours of sunlight a day. Up in Rovaniemi and points north they get little or none during the winter months. The language is pretty much impenetrable: It glories in fifteen cases, a vocabulary based not on anything Indo-European but on Uralic, from the depths of the Ural Read more >