Happy Fathers' Day in Finland

Many of you in Finland will be celebrating Fathers' Day on Sunday 11^th November. The day is particularly nice for the fathers of small children. I myself have fond memories of getting those lovingly crafted cards and presents made by my children at their Finnish kindergartens. In fact, I still own many I received more than 20 years ago. And it was always a real treat to be served breakfast in bed one morning a year.

In Britain, as Fathers' Day is on the third Sunday of June, I used to tell my kids that I should be entitled to two Fathers' Days a year. But they have never really warmed to the idea. And so, I have always had to be satisfied with being a Finnish father.  

This year, I realise for the first time how the day can also have a tinge of sadness to it, especially for those who do not have a father to greet. In my case, my father died in the spring and this is the first of what will be many Father’s Days without him.

Sunday November 11th also marks the 100^th anniversary of the end of World War I. Across Europe, and around the world, there will be many parades and ceremonies to mark the official armistice at 11 o’clock on the 11.11. This deadly conflict claimed the lives of 16 million soldiers between 1914 -1918. The average age of a soldier was only 19, which meant that most would never have experienced the joy of fatherhood before their short lives were terminated so tragically.

 

 

I am so grateful that I have been fortunate enough to be a father. I am certainly a better person from the experience. And even if you have never been a parent yourself, I hope you still feel that the day has importance. Many say that it is just a commercial event, that doesn’t need to be observed.  In that respect, I can assure you that expensive presents are not the important thing on the day. Instead, it is far better to give your father a homemade card if he is still around. Trust me, you will really make his day!

Congratulations Finland on your 100th birthday.

On the 6^th December 1917, an autonomous region in the far north of Europe finally broke free from the chains that had shackled it to the Russian empire since 1809.  

As Russia was imploding in the throes of revolution, the Finns seized the opportunity to declare their independence.  

The proclamation was read out with a characteristic ‘pig-headed’ determination by Pehr Evind Svinhufvud, the Chairman of the Senate of Finland. (Translated from Swedish, the name Svinhufvud literally means Pig Head). 

The Grand Duchy of Finland became an independent nation, personified as a beautiful Finnish maiden. 

Celebrations were short lived however. Barely one month later, the infant nation was embroiled in a bitter 5-month custody battle, a civil war pitting the bourgeois whites against the revolutionary reds. This was a war where idealism split regions and families.

The whites eventually won the day and it seemed as if the Finnish maiden would now be able to grow up in a stable culture free from tyranny. There were big hopes and dreams for her. Coincidentally, it was during her formative years, between the age of three and fourteen, that prohibition was introduced to the country. The young maiden's childhood was not sullied by the evils of liquor.

On her 15th birthday in 1932, however, prohibition was abolished, and her subjects were allowed to legally toast her health with Champagne once again. 

Soon, the Finnish maiden was entering young adulthood, which brought along new problems. In 1939, at the age of 21, the neighbourhood boys in the east started to call around uninvited. The next five years were very difficult times indeed, spent almost continually fending them off. And in 1945 she even had to deal with her former German suitors in Lapland.

By the 1950's, the bruised and battered Finnish maiden (now in her 30's) had to contemplate how to survive the decades ahead. She knew that she would have to get smart and fit if she was to survive the future. So, she dusted herself off and - with a quality known in Finnish as sisu (guts and determination) - set about educating herself and rebuilding the broken country. One of her great achievements of that decade was hosting the 1952 Olympics, the first games after the war. The nation won 22 medals, ranking 8th overall. Finland was back in business.

When she turned 78 in 1995, one would have thought that retirement would be on the cards. The Finnish maiden, however, had other plans.  She decided that the time in life was right to form an alliance with the west. This was not a marriage; after all, she was far too self-governing for that. Her relationship with the EU would be a civil partnership. This was a bold move to make for a staunchly independent lady and it did raise a few eyebrows at the time. But it was a good move and the country has prospered ever since.

And as she drew near to her 100^th birthday, there seemed no sign of a slowdown as can be seen in her achievements in the last 20 years: a 5th Nobel prize winner (there have been four others), internationally famous sportsmen, angry birds, musicians (masked and unmasked) and a brand of rubber boot that was once synonymous with mobile communication. 

I am sure that the coming years will be exciting times in this modern free-thinking democracy. Happy birthday Finland!

On the buses (I.O.W. part 2.)

The best way to travel around the Isle of Wight is on one of the many buses run by Southern Vectis.

It costs only £24 a week for unlimited journeys on their regularly scheduled service. It’s just not worth the expense or hassle of having a car over here. 

However, since many island roads are quite narrow, it can occasionally become a little unsettling on the double deckers when large overhanging tree branches hit the sides and roof of the bus as it hurtles along.

How it feels to be on top

 

Since all the Southern Vectis bus routes go through Newport in the centre of the island, the town has become our obvious basecamp for exploration this week.

                                                           Newport

Newport

 Newport (pop. 25 000) is the biggest town on the Isle of Wight, and the capital. 

However, it was rather sad for us to discover that although some parts of the town are thriving, the High Street, unfortunately, has not adapted well to change in recent years. 

Run down shops

Like other towns, Newport has had to contend with out of town supermarkets, internet shopping as well as the recession.

 In the High Street, in particular, it seems as though everyone has just given up trying to save it.

The old signs above the shops are seldom repainted when new businesses arrive. It is almost as though the new enterprises are expecting to go bankrupt sooner rather than later. 

The old post office

Even the magnificent post office building that once dominated the upper High Street has been abandoned, with nobody willing to take it on for a new purpose.

I know that I am being nostalgic for a time when every high street had its own butcher, baker and candlestick maker and that I must accept that change is inevitable. But still, I do think that Newport should make a little more of an effort if it wants to be known as the capital of the island.

A recycled chapel

However, not all is gloom and doom in Newport. The local chapel just around the corner from the High Street has been modernised, for example.

 In the past such a building once inspired the population of Newport towards the greater good.  Now that the building has been converted into a pub I wonder if people will draw inspiration from it again. 

It certainly inspires me J

The Isle of Wight adventure

Summertime booze!

It has been several years since I went to the Isle of Wight, my childhood home in England during the 1970’s.  And now that the summer is here, I’ll be revisiting some of my old haunts, in the hope that they, unlike me, have remained unspoilt over the course of time. 

                                             A few island facts 

The Isle of Wight

Lying 6 km off the mainland of Southern England, the Isle of Wight is diamond shaped, spanning 40 kilometres from west to east and 20 kilometres from north to south. However, although the island is famous for several things it does NOT have an annual TT motorbike race (go to the Isle of Man for that) and it is NOT a tax paradise (see Jersey instead). Nevertheless, the Isle of Wight is home to 120 000 people and it did host an iconic pop festival in 1970; it was even mentioned in the Beatles song, “When I’m 64”.

                                                                                                                 

                                                                         All at sea

As you would expect, the sea surrounding the island plays a major part in everyday life. And as the difference between a high and a low tide can be several metres, knowing the right time when to leave the beach just might save your life, or stop you from running aground in a boat. Simply put, it takes 12.5 hours for the tide to come in and the same amount of time for it to go out. This means that every day the high tide is one hour later than the day before, albeit the Solent (the body of water separating the Isle of Wight from England) actually has two high tides. 

Fishbourne harbour at high tide

                                                      

                                                                   Hovering about

A hovercraft

I decided to play it safe with the tides and instead of going by boat, I flew in to the island from Southsea by hovercraft,  a wonderfully noisy machine  originally invented by a Finn called Toivo J.Kaario, even though most of the credit is given to a Brit called Christopher Cockrell. 

But, let's not get bogged down  in detail. After all this is supposed to be a summer blog:-) The best thing about the hovercraft is that it only takes 10 minutes to make the crossing, which means that there will be more time  to sample some of the island pubs this evening. 

Life in the Moomin Valley

The Moomins, from the 1990–91 television animation.
From left to right, Sniff, Moominmamma, Moominpappa,
Moomintroll (Moomin) and Little My.

It was almost 30 years ago when I first learnt about a peculiar place called the Moomin Valley. This is an idyllic magical part of Finland inhabited by the Moomins, white hippopotamus-like creatures created by Finnish illustrator and writer Tove Jansson in 1945. 

Over a period of 70 years, the Moomin stories have continued to thrill Finns of all ages.  Although I didn’t know about the Moomins before moving to Finland, I got to know all about them through my children, by reading the books, watching the films and singing the songs.

A Moomin playhouse

                    A land of Moomin-mania

Finland is a land of Moomin-mania where fact and fiction often merge. A Finn will have no hesitation telling you that the Moomins live in a pointy blue house with white windows; after all there are numerous replica Moomin houses used as playhouses found in gardens all over the country.

In Finland, there is even a Moomin Valley theme park in a place called Naantali, which every Finnish child will have visited, if they were fortunate enough to have been blessed with good caring parents. Incidentally, I was not one of those parents! (And my adult kids are still suffering to this day).

Knowing your stuff!

Besides the Moomins, there are several other creatures in the Moomin Valley. In this 70^th anniversary year, you would be well warned not to try to come to this country without knowing what these creatures are called or how they look. 

The Moomins and their friends are so close to the Finnish psyche that everyone needs to be able tell a Hattifatterer from a Fillyjonk. Not being able to do proves to all concerned that you are either rude or stupid, if not both.

   Everyone has their favourite character

In Finland, everyone has their favourite Moomin Valley character; for some it might be the philosophical patriarch Moominpappa with his top-hat or the caring Moominmamma with her stripy apron and magical handbag. 

Stinky on the run

For others it might be the timid Sniff, who looks like a Dachshund walking on hind legs (BTW Sniff is in the very top picture on the left). And for some, the favourite could be Little My (the small angry one holding a rolling pin). 

My hero, however,  is definitely Stinky,  a furry wide-eyed black blob, who is often portrayed running away with drink bottles from parties he hasn't been invited to. 

I like to think that Stinky was the propagator of the modern Finnish beer run.

               What is a Finnish beer run?

A Finnish beer run takes place at any shop or kiosk where beer is sold. In Finland, beer often comes in packs of six or twelve. A twelve pack is affectionately known as a Dachshund (Mäyräkoira) due to its shape. My Moomin character Stinky would have called it a ‘Sniff’ but let’s not bog ourselves down with details. So a Finnish beer run means grabbing two Dachsunds, one in each hand, and running as fast as you can out of the shop without paying. Way to go Stinky!

                                                                  A time for change

As you probably realise, my friend Stinky has a very bad reputation in Moomin Valley. The Moomins say he is always trying to cheat everyone and often gets caught. However, I feel that he is totally misrepresented and the Moomins themselves must take some responsibility for that. 

So now after 70 years I think it is time to have a little social change in the Moomin Valley. After all, let’s not forget that the Moomins are the ones with all the money and the nice big house. What does Stinky have…nothing.

                                                                                                      A new social contract

Moomin Inc.

Perhaps it is about time that the Moomins let Stinky in on their lucrative mug factory operation on the other side of the Moomin Valley. There, the Moomins have successfully been producing limited edition ceramic Moomin merchandise since the 1950s. 

                  A golden future ahead

The good news for the Moomins is that there’s no shortage of collectors in Finland queuing up to buy their products.  I am certainly looking forward to seeing  Stinky’s rehabilitation into Moomin society in the future…assuming of course that he would ever actually consider being rehabilitated.  

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No pain no gain

It’s been a while now since I wrote anything on this blog. I must confess that the reason  for this pause has been the result of the shear volume of bad news going around. It has been hard to write anything at all without trivializing world events.  In the first three months of 2015, Islamic terrorism has featured a lot; the first occurrence being the Charlie Hebdo attack on 7^th January. Yes we were all 'Je suis Charlie' for a while on that one.  Now we are still trying to digest the most recent attack by al-Shabab militants at Garissa University, Kenya, on the 2^nd April.

Since that last attack, which claimed the lives of 148 innocents, I have been trying to once again comprehend how my world view, fueled on a diet of western media, self-irony, bacon sandwiches and beer, will ever come to accept and tolerate the fancies of extremist Muslims; and the simple truth is, it won’t.

While reminding myself of the events surrounding the first three months of 2015, I deliberately watched a video of a man burning to death. Do you remember that one? This was no chance happening; a case of clicking on the wrong link at the wrong time.  I had actively searched for it! I wanted to see the primeval barbarity of Islamist extremists as they burnt a human being to death in the name of their God. It took a while to find the right site; but I knew I had it when a warning popped up stating that I would see disturbing images if I continued. I clicked the mouse! And in doing so, I became one of several million viewers who have watched the horrific execution of Jordanian pilot Muadh al-Kasasbeh. I will not watch it again.

I had wanted to know why ISIS had chosen this barbaric form of execution over their relatively civilised standard methods of beheadings or shootings. Was it because Muadh al-Kasasbeh was a Muslim that he had been executed in this particularly horrific manner?  I know that Islam has a special hell for the apostate. But then I realised that their intension here was to mimic the effects of incendiary bombs dropped from the air. First there was the burning, followed by the smashing of his body under bulldozed concrete. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth!

In this respect, the Jihadists make a fare point, even though I personally lean more towards the wisdom of Mahatma Gandhi, who famously said that an eye for an eye ends up making the whole world blind. Unfortunately, in Gandhi’s case, such liberal thinking didn’t help him live to a ripe old age; his brief dance on the world’s stage abruptly ended when he was hit by three bullets fired from an assassin’s gun: a gun held by a non-Muslim incidentally.

I slowly began to realise that Muslims have been having a really hard time of it this year. Not only have they been the main victims of violence, they have been portrayed as the main perpetrators too.

Therefore, it is very important not to forget that on the 24^th March 2015, radical Islam took a day off. This was the day when a German co-pilot called Andreas Lubitz decided to leave this world with a bang. He did this by flying a passenger jet into a mountainside at more than 700 kilometres an hour, extinguishing the lives of 149 innocent people in the process.

Interestingly, even the most speculative investigations by the tabloid press failed to find any trace of a link between his actions and the Muslim world. No Jihad inspired video has ever turned up. In fact, common wisdom now accepts that this particular tragedy was actually due to the co-pilot’s suicidal state of mind, which raises some rather awkward questions for a white non-Muslim like myself.

For example, on a scale of depravity, could it actually be worse to kill others in the name of depression rather than in the name of God? Unfortunately I still haven’t got an answer to that one, but it certainly gets me thinking. What  I do know for certain, however, is that we’re all going to have to start being much nicer to one another if 2015 is going to be anything other than an awful year to remember.

Names and numbers

The past week has proven once again why I still love to live in Finland.

Last Friday, just over half of the Finnish parliament (52%) decided to vote in favour of gender-neutral marriage. It was big news for a day and rainbow flags were waved on the steps of the parliament building in celebration. This slim majority decision shows that the democratic process works in Finland and that minorities can have rights too.

Unfortunately, the Archbishop of the Lutheran church may have got a little carried away during all the merriment. He is a modern theologian and, in keeping with the times, used his Facebook account to inform the world that he thought the parliament’s decision was a wonderful thing. This led to 12,000 people resigning from the church in protest over the weekend. You couldn't make it up!

Although this reaction from a disgruntled congregation may appear as a mass exodus of biblical proportions, we should remember that the church has well over 4 million members (75 % of the Finnish population, in fact). Percentage-wise, that means that only about 0.3% of the church population was actually against the idea of same sex marriage. They were such a small minority that they were deemed expendable for the sake of the 99.7% who had another opinion.

I love statistics, because they help me to quickly make some kind of sense of the world I live in. The only thing I try to keep in mind, however, is to question the source as, more often than not, something quoted online has very little substance when examined in detail. This recent gender-neutral marriage vote, for example, is a good example of this. In my opinion, surely it would have been worth knowing how much of the Finnish population is actually gay before putting everyone through the trauma of change.

Unfortunately, I could not find any official statistics to help answer this rather important detail.  However, I did discover that some Gallup polls put the figure for homosexuality in the USA as high as 10%. But then the question arose about what it is that actually classifies people as gay. 

Is being gay a lifestyle choice, do you have to remain gay permanently to be considered gay or is there actually a gay gene? Scientific research is extremely vague on this last part, although it appears to tentatively hint that there is no conclusive evidence that there is a genetic disposition towards homosexuality, despite recent unpublished reports to the contrary. 

And so my conclusion, concerning that vote in Finland last week, is that it has brought a new right to an as yet unknown minority. Let’s hope that this minority actually turns out to be larger than the 0.3% minority who had to leave their church in protest in the first place.

One week later and now we are about to celebrate Finnish Independence Day (6^th December). I always smile when I hear the name as I think Finnish National Day would be a far more appropriate term to use;  after all Finland has been a full-standing member of the EU since 1995. 

Unlike national days elsewhere, the Finnish occasion is actually a somber one, more in line with an Armistice Day than a party. 

I believe that the most bizarre tradition on the day is the president’s party. Every year about 2000 lucky guests (0.04% of the population BTW) will have the right to shake the president’s hand while the rest of the country watches on television (all funded by the tax payer, I might add).  The uninvited masses then take enormous pleasure in comparing and criticizing the dresses of the ladies being presented. You couldn't make it up!

I wish you all a nice weekend of celebration however and with whomever you choose.