The Almost Nearly Perfect People

by Michael Booth

  Eventually, the ticket girl asks him, ‘Why do you keep coming back and buying new tickets?’

  The Norwegian man, exasperated, says, ‘Every time I try to go in, that man over by the door tears them in half!’

  I asked Eriksen about the jokes the Danes told about the Norwegians. Were they bothered? ‘Oh, we couldn’t care less,’ he laughed. ‘They’ve got their pathetic little flat country. They are just jealous . . . Actually, we are very fond of the Danes – we see them as cosmopolitan and hyggelig. Even their flag is hyggelig. They even use it to sell stuff, on packaging. In Norway the flag is almost sacred. There would be uproar if someone put it on the side of a tin of ham.’

  I think we can probably conclude that the Norwegians are not as stupid as the Danes and the Swedes like to make out. It is not easy sucking all that oil up from the depths of the North Sea, you know. Norway has topped the United Nations’ Human Development Index in recent years (including at the time of writing), ironic given that the index was originally created as a way to assess countries on values other than wealth. Nevertheless, it means that Norway is officially the very best country in the world. Sort of. It is also the most gender equal and the most politically stable country in the world. Meanwhile, Norway has the lowest rate of imprisonment of any European country – just 3,500 of its citizens reside behind bars, compared with twice that many in Scotland, which has a similar-sized population.

  And Norway is fighting back with the jokes, too. They never pass up a chance to ridicule the Danish language, for instance. Norwegians consider theirs to be the one true, pure Scandinavian tongue. It was an important element of the nationalist separatist movement in the nineteenth century, not least as a way to eradicate Danish influence. Around this time the Norwegians took the radical step of defining an additional Norwegian language, Nynorsk, based on rural dialects. Nynorsk was actually closer to Old Norse and traditional Norwegian dialects than the mainstream Norwegian language, Bokmål, which was, essentially, bastardised Danish. Nynorsk never came close to replacing Bokmål, but it is the official language for a little over 10 per cent of Norwegians, mostly in Western Norway.

  In fact, Danish – in particular what the Swedes and Norwegians claim is its declining intelligibility, with the Danes apparently slurring and swallowing even more of their words, and employing even more glottal stops as time passes – is increasingly the butt of jokes throughout Scandinavia. As improbable as this may sound, one of the funniest TV comedy sketches I have ever seen featured two Norwegian comedians from the show Uti Vår Hage pretending to be Danes trying to communicate with each other (the sketch is in English and is listed on YouTube as, simply, ‘Danish Language’: it’s had over three million hits to date). ‘The Danish language has collapsed into meaningless guttural sounds,’ begins one desperate ‘Dane’. He enters a hardware store: ‘I didn’t even remember the Danish word for hello. I didn’t understand anything, so I just repeated what he said. I had to take a wild shot and so I just said the word Kamelåså.’ The sketch ends with the shopkeeper making a plea to the camera: ‘If nothing is done, the Danish society will collapse! I want to direct an appeal to the United Nations and the international community. Please help us.’

  Such fond ribbing is reserved for close neighbours. The Norwegians’ attitudes towards immigrants from further afield remains conflicted, as was seen with the arrival of a group of two hundred Romanian gypsies in Oslo as the Breivik trial rumbled towards its conclusion. The Roma set up camp in the grounds of Sofienberg Church in central Oslo, provoking outrage among local politicians and the media. Certain Norwegian websites were reported as calling the Roma ‘rats’ and ‘inhuman’. ‘These people have no business being here, they should have been thrown out of Sofienberg Church and thrown out of Norway,’ one local politician told TV2. ‘We can’t have a situation whereby Norway and Oslo serve as the world’s social-welfare office.’ As I write, the mayor is trying to ban begging to force the Roma out, and others are talking seriously about closing the borders to the country.

  As usual, the then prime minister Jens Stoltenberg provided a voice of moderation: ‘One of the things 22 July showed us was how important it is not to judge and brand people just because they belong to a certain group. These kinds of words and expressions can only lead to more hatred and conflict,’ he said.

  One can but hope such sentiments might eventually win the argument up here in the frosty North. It would suit the Norwegians so much better to show a little more openness and generosity of spirit. After all, for all their recent traumas, they have so very much to be grateful for. They have very similar advantages to the Danes in terms of social cohesion, equality, homogeneity and life quality, and if anything 22/7 seems to have brought them even closer together as a society.

  ‘After 22/7 one really had the feeling, bloody hell, we are a family,’ Eriksen told me. ‘We are such a small group. The Prime Minister, the mayor of Oslo, the Crown prince, all these luminaries, they were not up there, they belonged to, and among us. The King spoke to us like a bereaved uncle, the PM spoke to us like our neighbour, and even the Crown prince gave this very strong sense of cultural intimacy. Because the differences between the top and bottom of society are so small, you meet. Everybody knows that if you live in this part of town and you go skiing in winter in the hills just outside town, you sometimes meet the Prime Minister. I know him a bit, like lots of people. I say hello.

  ‘The point is that you can look at this sociologically – the chances of a Norwegian knowing the prime minister, or knowing someone who knows him, is twice as high as they would be in Sweden, where there are twice as many people. Or eight times as high as in Spain. You have this sense of really being connected with a big family. There is a high level of trust. One of the things you miss if you travel if you are Norwegian is to just sit on the tram and doze and know it’s safe. That feeling.’

  This feeling of unthreatened somnolence, of peace, stability and calm is, of course, central to the sense of security and quality of life enjoyed by the people of the North and, by extension, also to their happiness. But safety, functionality, consensus, moderation, social cohesion – these aren’t the be-all and end-all of life, merely the foundations for a pyramid of needs. I would not be the first person to point out that Scandinavia might be a little lacking in a few of the things that you might hope to find further up that pyramid – the passion and spark, the flamboyance and joie de vivre you find if you venture further south, for instance. Where in Scandinavia is the emotion and the drive, the conflict and risk, the sense of a life lived on the edge?

  I’ll tell you where . . .

  FINLAND

  Chapter 1

  Santa

  ASK ANY JOURNALIST about their worst nightmare and it will likely be that they have conducted a fascinating, revealing, intimate interview with someone really, really famous and then come rushing home, for once actually excited about transcribing the conversation, only to discover that their tape recorder hasn’t worked. It happened to me when I was interviewing the most famous man in the world.

  I had travelled to the capital of Lapland, Rovaniemi, on the edge of the Finnish Arctic Circle, together with my ten-year-old son. It was July, the season of the white nights, with twenty-four-hour sunlight. One o’clock in the morning was just like one in the afternoon; deeply discombobulating. Finland was also in the midst of a rare heat wave. Together, the raging white light and the sweltering heat created a whole heap of cognitive dissonance as we arrived that evening at Santa Claus Village, ‘The Official Home of Father Christmas’, amid the pine forests 20 kilometres north of the city. We stood in our shorts and T-shirts, waiting in line to enter Santa’s grotto, listening to Christmas carols, watching videos of reindeer gambolling in the snow, and trying to summon some yuletide spirit.

  The Village is made up of a cluster of log cabins housing what is, essentially, a glorified outlet centre. It is staffed by elves who maintain a near-hysterical pitch of eagerness at all times. One of them s
howed us around Santa’s post office, almost giddy at the sheer, unadulterated Christmassy fun of it all. (The only brief chink in her otherwise redoubtably bouncy façade came when my son asked why there was no pigeonhole for letters from children in Denmark. The answer is because the Danes believe Santa lives in Greenland, but the elf could never admit this, of course, so spent several minutes in an enthusiastic but, as she and I both knew full well, ultimately doomed search for the elusive Danish pigeon hole.)

  On reflection, some might argue that taking a child to see Father Christmas in July is probably tantamount to child abuse, but my son seemed to enjoy it. And when we were finally shown in to see Santa, who was sitting on a throne in a kind of jazzed-up photographer’s studio, and I saw how genuinely overwhelmed my eldest was by the experience, even my outlet-shopping-centre-induced cynicism dissipated. Slightly.

  Santa listened attentively to my brilliant, original questions (‘What would you like for Christmas?’ ‘What do you do for the other 364 days of the year?’ and so on), and gave excellent answers with only a hint of a Finnish accent (to the first: ‘That the children of the world have good health and education,’ to the second: ‘It’s a year-round job!’), ho-ho-hoing in an only slightly forced manner at the conclusion of each answer. Just before we left, we had a chance to make our own wishes. My son asked for world peace. I asked for a Maserati. It could not have gone better.

  But then I returned to my hotel room, casually pressed play, and instead of the Christmassy Frost/Nixon I had expected, my state-of-the-art Marantz digital recorder merely presented me with an insolent ‘Error’ message. After jabbing at its buttons frantically for 10 minutes in the manner of a laboratory chimp attempting to activate his food supply, I realised wearily that there was only one solution.

  Usually, I would do what any good journalist would have done: try to remember as much as possible from the interview, and make the rest up; but as I had been recording for radio, this clearly was not going to wash. We would have to do a retake. Back to Santa’s log cabin we went. I have to say, Santa was a true pro, finding space in his schedule within the hour, acting as if he had never met us, and answering as if my questions were just as original and brilliant as they were the first time he had heard them.

  It was neither the first nor the last time I would have cause to marvel at the Finns’ famed dependability in a crisis. (I might add that, while I was trying to get my voice recorder to work, the lovely PR woman for Rovaniemi who accompanied us on the visit had called the Finnish national broadcasting company and they had promised to bring me a replacement machine within the hour. I remind you, this was up in the Arctic Circle.)

  Now is probably a good time to make my confession about Finland, our next destination in this Nordic odyssey: I think the Finns are fantastic. I can’t get enough of them. I would be perfectly happy for the Finns to rule the world. They get my vote, they’ve won my heart. If you ask me, they should just change the word ‘fantastic’ to ‘Finntastic’. Helsinki? Heavensinki more like.

  I am not the only one in thrall to the home of the Moomins, monosyllabic racing-car drivers and Nokia. The Finnish school system draws educationalists from around the world keen to learn its secrets: according to international rankings, the Finns have the best education system in the world. They currently have the third most competitive economy, too. Within the last couple of years Newsweek, the Legatum Institute and Monocle magazine have all rated the country or its capital as the best place on the planet in which to live, bar none. Currently, Finland has the highest per capita income in Western Europe, and is the only economy in the eurozone to retain its AAA rating from those pesky ratings agencies. The Finns are perceived to be the least corrupt people on earth – they were joint-first with the Danes and the New Zealanders in Transparency International’s latest survey.

  Finns are solid, dependable. They also have a Sahara-dry sense of humour freighted with a heavily understated irony. During one visit to Helsinki while I was researching this book, I fell into conversation with a lugubrious Finnish film director late one night in a crowded bar. At one point I happened to mention the title I had in mind. He paused, his tumbler of vodka midway towards his mouth, fixed me with his heavy lidded gaze, and said, levelly: ‘What do you mean, “Almost nearly”?’

  The Finns are also the most courteous of all the Nordic people. Admittedly this is a close call, a little like saying that the orangutans have the best table manners of all non-human primates, but as an Englishman living in this region you come to appreciate politeness wherever you find it. They are hardly David Niven, but Finns do wait for you to disembark from trains, stand aside to let you through doorways, and rarely ask how on earth you make a living from writing.

  The more I got to know about them, and in particular their country’s harrowing, conflict-riven history, the more my affection and respect for the Finns grew to the point where, these days, I am an unashamed groupie and cheerleader for all things Finnish. In conversations regarding the relative merits of any two countries – the vast majority of which, by definition, tend not to concern Finland – I will be heard to say, ‘Ah, but you see, that never happens in Finland,’ (if it’s something bad), or ‘They have far more of them in Finland’ (if it’s something good, like holidays, for instance).

  So, though there will be elements of balanced reporting over the coming pages, bear in mind that I think Finland – or ‘Suomi’, as they call it (possibly from the Finnish for swamp, suo, although I find that very hard to believe) – is terrific.

  That said, this wasn’t my initial impression of this nation of Nordic outsiders, who straddle the cultural and tectonic rift between Western and Eastern Europe. In fact, the initial word on Finland could not have been much less encouraging. The ‘Visit Helsinki’ website was the first tourist board site I had ever seen that carried adverts for another destination (Minorca), for instance. I had heard the Finns were a modest people, but this was like hiding one’s light under a bushel and then locking it in a cupboard, and whenever anyone asked about it, saying, ‘What, this bushel here? No, no, nothing under there.’

  Other reports were similarly off-putting. A Danish relative who had been to Helsinki on a business trip described a cold, grey pre-Glasnost Soviet-style city peopled by dour giants who turned into drunken maniacs at the first ‘pssscht’ of a beer can. His business contacts had taken him to a memorably grim strip club on the second floor of a suburban tower block. He shuddered at the recollection and refused to provide further details, other than to confess to waking up, literally, in a gutter the next morning.

  Another old Finland hand told me that, of the top three most prescribed drugs in the country, the first was an anti-psychotic medicine, the second was insulin and the third was another anti-psychosis or antidepressant treatment. According to a report I read on an English-language Finnish news site, hundreds of thousands of Finns are hooked on the anxiety and insomnia drug benzodiazepine. More worryingly still, they have the third highest rate of gun ownership in the world (after the US and Yemen); the highest murder rate in Western Europe; and are famously hard and reckless drinkers as well as enthusiastic suicidalists.

  Unlike Sweden or Denmark – both of which have given the world a good few film-makers, musicians, writers and lately, of course, TV series – Finland’s cultural output has struggled to extend its reach beyond the Baltic. There is Sibelius, of course, an architect or two (Eliel Saarinen, Alvar Aalto), and the Moomins, but other than that and a few sports stars (all of whom seemed to specialise in loner sports like long-distance running and racing-car driving), Finns did not seem especially drawn to the limelight. The list of famous Finns on Wikipedia features such marquee names as:

  Ior Bock – eccentric

  Tony Halme – show wrestler

  Väinö Myllyrinne – the tallest Finn

  In preparation for my first trip to Finland, I acquainted myself with the work of their most acclaimed film-maker, Aki Kaurismäki (sadly not the director I met in the
bar). His films, like The Match Factory Girl and The Man Without a Past, were so unremittingly morose they made Bergman look like Mr Bean. A typical Kaurismäki film presents a cast of, essentially, gargoyles, who toil in wretched jobs (coal mining, dish washing), exchange grunts and drink heroically. Eventually some of them shoot themselves to death. The end.

  This would appear to mirror their auteur’s outlook on life: ‘I more or less know I will kill myself, but not yet,’ Kaurismäki told a recent interviewer. I do hope he doesn’t. I love his films and their strangely life-enhancing wretchedness, but tourist-board promos they are not.

  Trawling the Internet for something remotely positive about Finland I found a website called ‘You Know You Have Been in Finland Too Long When . . .’ It included the following:

  When a stranger on the street smiles at you:

  you assume he is drunk

  he is insane

  he’s an American

  It would, then, be all too easy to form a picture of the Finns as an unhappy, often paralytically drunk hybrid of repressed, Swedish-style conformism and Russian barbarity, as many do. But persevere, I implore you. Get on a plane and go to Helsinki. The city is like a breath of fresh air, not least because the air is so very fresh. Its centre is small – you could walk across it in 20 minutes – but spacious, and refreshingly non-commercial, its streets are lined with linden trees, and there is a cosy harbour front, not unlike Oslo’s, with islets and ferries, but lent a little frisson of Eastern exoticism by the onion dome of an Orthodox church and the splendid, dazzlingly white tsarist cathedral nearby.

  At the iconic Fazer’s Konditori (now Fazer Café & Restaurang), once the scene of revolutionary foment against the Russians, you can stuff your face with superb cakes, chocolates and ice cream (you can also foment against the Russians if you like, it’s up to you). There are trams and cycle paths, stout public buildings (the muscle-bound caryatids fronting Saarinen’s stern, rationalist Central station are fabulously camp) and listening posts dotted about the city with speakers that broadcast poems when you press a button, just in case you are out and about and found yourself in need of a couplet.