The Almost Nearly Perfect People

by Michael Booth

  In 2006 there had been another shocking, though thankfully not fatal, incident which had shaken Finland to the core. Unreported by the international media, in May of that year, another eighteen-year-old boy, Kalle Holm, burned down Finland’s most sacred church, Porvoo’s fifteenth-century cathedral, where Tsar Alexander I had granted Finland autonomy from Sweden in 1809.

  I asked Scheinin for his theories on the two school shootings. Could they in any way be attributed to the Finnish education system? He thought not: he had a different scapegoat in mind. ‘For centuries we have been looking at you [the British and Americans] – your literature, art, culture, and so on, have been models for us and now, especially with the Internet, Finnish youths have been watching the United States, role-modelling all the time. Think to yourself, why didn’t this happen fifty years ago? There is a simple reason: you would have had to be bloody smart and crazy to have invented it yourself.’

  ‘So, you’re saying this is copycat behaviour inspired by Americans?’ I asked. ‘It’s nothing to do with academic pressures, or the dark Finnish soul?’

  ‘These days if you are in a small, dark minority you can find a network anywhere in the world, and the Finns have an aptitude for looking for role models,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what your youth was like, but I had my dark moments. I think the problem is that you need to look at the communication between teachers, the school nurse, and psychologists. They tend not to communicate very well.’

  As we have seen in Norway, random madmen with guns are indeed a tragic fact of life everywhere; Finland’s two school massacres are probably more symptomatic of the fact that, as I mentioned earlier, the country is third only to the USA and Yemen in global gun-ownership levels. As one local told me, ‘We are a hunting nation. We shoot 65,000 elk a year, sometimes in Helsinki there are bears, and there are wolves.’

  A couple of days later I was in the Kamppi Mall in central Helsinki, stocking up on Moomin memorabilia. On the top floor I noticed a group of teenagers hanging out in front of a skateboarding store. Smiling broadly, trying not to seem like some shifty perv and making no sudden movements, I approached them, explained that I was researching their country’s education system and was interested in hearing the views of ‘ordinary’ school-goers. Could I perhaps ask them some questions? Behind their long fringes I saw the two boys and a girl scan the area for an escape route, then glance, panic-stricken, at each other. Then they turned their gazes down to their Converse.

  I should have realised that classic Finnish reticence, combined with universal teenage angst, was never likely to make for particularly sparkling conversation. Most of their answers to my questions were communicated through shoulder movements, awkward shuffles, and grunts. None were especially quotable (‘Generally, how do you feel about school?’ ‘Pschht, prffgh. It’s okay.’). But, if I were to draw any conclusion from this brief non-interaction with Finnish youth, it would be this: Finnish teenagers are as pissed off and hormonal as any other teenagers.

  Chapter 7

  Wives

  THE FUTURE HAS never looked brighter for Finland. Not that they would ever let on, of course, but the rest of the world is beginning to take note. As well as the ongoing PISA success, its strong economy, and a generally exemplary standard of living, the world is finally cottoning on to the fact that quiet, shy, battered, bruised but indomitable Finland has a great deal of knowledge to share with the world.

  Typically, on hearing of the accolades from the likes of Newsweek or the Legatum Institute heralding Finland or Helsinki as the greatest places to live in the world, the Finns shrug, frown, shake their heads and point out that they are still the poorest country in the Nordic region, still essentially five million woodsmen who have emerged from the forests and prefer to return there whenever possible, plus a few snobby Swedes. They are still the same old socially inept, self-destructive alcoholics they always were.

  ‘It would be ridiculous to say Finland is heaven on earth,’ says Heikki Aittokoski when I mention the Newsweek survey to him. ‘It’s a fine country, there are lots of things that work here, but I don’t see it as a paradise.’ Within hours of the Newsweek article being published, his newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, had pounced on a mistake in the US magazine’s calculations. Switzerland should have won, it claimed.

  Another Finnish journalist reacting to the survey wrote: ‘What about the suicides, depression, alcoholism and our cold, dark winters? . . . Many of us feel that Finland is a Jekyll-and-Hyde country. We have both the positive and the negative in extremes, just like sunshine: the never-setting summer sun is offset by several months of dark winter.’ It was an almost perfect statement of the Finn’s chronically negative self-image.

  When asked in a survey a few years ago to select eight adjectives to describe themselves, the Finns chose: honest, slow, reliable, true, shy, direct, reserved and punctual. Hardly descriptive of a confident, thrusting nation, is it? But whether they will admit it or not, there are signs that Finland’s moment is coming at last, that the country is emerging from the shadow of its overbearing, bullying neighbours. The most recent World Economic Forum Global Competitiveness Index, which assesses which countries are in the best position for future growth, puts Finland in third place (this is particularly gratifying as they bumped Sweden down to fourth).

  But still it is left to outsiders like Roman Schatz or Neil Hardwick to sing the country’s praises. ‘I was once asked, if I could change three things about Finland, what would they be?’ Hardwick told me. ‘And I joked, “The climate, the inhabitants and the geographical location.” These days I am hard-pressed to think of things I would change.’

  I had visited Helsinki a couple of times and fallen in love with it but, aside from a day trip to Porvoo – an exceptionally pretty historic town a little outside of Helsinki – I had not seen much of the rest of the country. So I decided to take a trip through the ‘real’ Finland in the hope of forming a more nuanced picture of this mysterious land and its people. Having done so, I now have a good idea why the Finns are so negative and downbeat about themselves and their country.

  After our visit to Santa in the Arctic, my son and I travelled down the ‘spine’ of the country and, from what I can make out, Finland is almost entirely forest. Viewed from our train window, it was little more than a monotonous green blur. The trains themselves were paragons of modernity: the tickets were cheap, with allocated seats (the second sign of a civilised country, after wine in the cinemas), and mostly empty. Best of all, unlike on Danish trains which can sometimes feel like you are in a Hogarth cartoon that’s come to life, what with all the drinking, snogging, shouting and screaming, absolutely nobody speaks.

  I was less impressed by the hotels – or rather, by their curtains. This may sound nitpicky, but in the land of the midnight sun you would have thought they would invest in thicker drapes. Instead, the dazzling white light floodlit our hotel rooms throughout the nights and, like Al Pacino in the deservedly forgotten movie Insomnia, I was driven to the very brink of insanity by being unable to sleep.1 Every gap, every moth-hole, every chink in the weave of the fabric used in the curtains of my various hotel rooms on that trip allowed the sunlight to drill through my eyelids like the lamp in an interrogation room. And then there were the midges and mosquitoes. Venture anywhere in the Finnish countryside during summer and you will instantly become enveloped in a cloud of insects, like Charlie Brown’s friend Pig-Pen.

  Though they boasted wonderfully scenic settings, the provincial lakeside towns we stopped at on the way from Rovaniemi to Helsinki – Oulu, Iisalmi, Kuopio – were mostly charmless, featuring the same nondescript assortment of modern concrete blocks and H&M stores. Thanks to a combination of the Nazis’ scorched-earth policy and the progressive social democratic housing policies of the 1970s (the latter described to me by one Finn as a symptom of their national inferiority complex: they were anxious to be seen as as modern as the Swedes), there was little of architectural or historical interest. It did eventually occu
r to me that the absence of old buildings might actually have been quite liberating for the Finns: perhaps it made them more open to change and progress. Architectural determinism, if you like. But still, I missed a sense of the past.

  As far as I could make out, there was nothing edible outside of Helsinki either. The dining options were quite execrable – either crappy pizza, outdated Italian, or reindeer. Always reindeer. In these towns the main pastime for the locals on a summer’s evening appeared to be either cruising around in old American cars, or heading down to the harbour carrying crates of beer with the express intention of getting as drunk as possible very quickly.

  On a balmy Saturday evening in Kuopio, we went for a walk to try to find something edible. As we followed the quiet crowds down to the lake, I began to feel a slight sense of unease, but could not put my finger on why. Eventually, my son spotted it. ‘Where are the children?’ he said. And he was right. There were none. It felt like a scene from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. The citizens of Kuopio had presumably surrendered their children to their babysitters (hopefully not the Child Catcher), and were now intent on getting massively shit-faced.

  Despite this dispiriting glimpse of life in the ‘real’ Finland, I remain a huge fan of the Finns. Got all their albums. And I am not the only one. Helsinki has just enjoyed a stint as World Design Capital; the Finnish economy is more export-orientated than ever before (accounting for almost 40 per cent of GDP); and Finland is recovering faster from the economic crisis of 2008 than virtually all the other eurozone countries. It comfortably holds the top spot in the OECD’s latest list of gross domestic expenditure on research and development as a percentage of GDP with an impressive 3.87 per cent. Even more encouraging is the fact that relatively little of this is public money (24 per cent, compared with 46.8 per cent in Norway). Little Finland is also filing lots of patents – it is the 115th largest country by population in the world, but it ranks 13th in terms of patent applications according to the World International Property Organization.

  Admittedly, there is the perennial fear that Finland still has an ‘all-its-eggs-in-one-basket’ economy, the egg in question being the beleaguered phone company, Nokia. At times Nokia has borne the weight of as much as a quarter of Finland’s GDP, an astonishing burden for a single company. Things are not going well for Nokia. It has been usurped as the world’s largest mobile phone manufacturer by Samsung and most ignominiously of all, was recently bought by Microsoft – a move, widely interpreted as a national tragedy. If such a thing were possible, today Apple could probably buy the entire country.

  ‘We are desperately trying to diversify our industrial and economic base,’ a spokesperson from the foreign ministry told me. ‘We need a second Nokia because after timber and shipping it’s all we have. We have a lot of small-scale innovators and invest really well in research and development, but we are a country of engineers, we lack marketing skills. We are very modest.’

  One major advantage Finland has in terms of its labour market is that it is arguably the most gender-equal society in the world. Finnish women were the first in Europe to get the vote (1906); it is customary for half of parliament to be female; and the country has had both female prime ministers and female presidents. In 2011 over 60 per cent of Finnish university graduates were women.

  ‘Finnish women are dominant,’ Roman Schatz, a self-confessed fan of the species, enthused to me. ‘Traditionally, on Finnish farms the woman was chief of everything under the roof, including the males, and the men were there to take care of everything outside. No Finnish man would ever decide anything without consulting his wife. Men do the dishes. We don’t have housewives in Finland – no one can afford to live from one salary. Women don’t stay at home and breastfeed, they have their own careers and banks accounts. It’s great – my divorce only cost me a hundred euro.’

  This gender equality extends to the corporate world, says Schatz. ‘I’ve seen it happen so many times that two guys from overseas come to a Finnish company and are met by two men and a woman, and they assume the chick is going to make the coffee or take notes. Then, fifteen minutes in, they realise something is seriously odd here – the chick appears to be senior to the other guys. Do not underestimate the Finnish woman. We have more women with high-school diplomas and more women with degrees, the highest percentage of women in parliament.’

  ‘Finnish women are tremendous,’ agrees Neil Hardwick. ‘I got so used in England to women pretending they were a bit sillier when they were in the company of men so as not to frighten them off, but here women take the initiative. It is a very matriarchal society.’

  I am not sure where the Wife-carrying World Championships fits in to all this. My son and I stopped off to catch the action, which takes place every July in the small, one-street town of Sonkajärvi, slap bang in the centre of the country. As far as I can make out, this hilarious competition is held primarily for the benefit of Asian TV news crews, who love nothing more than an eccentric Finnish sporting event (see also the Air Guitar Championships in Oulu; the various dwarf- and mobile-phone-throwing competitions; Oulu’s Garlic Festival; the Swamp Soccer World Championships, and so on). It takes place at the local school’s running track amid a country-fair atmosphere with craft stalls, tombolas and beer tents, and started in the mid-nineties, concocted from local legends of rogues and brigands who supposedly stole other men’s wives. Today the event attracts competitors from around the world or, at least, from Estonia – the Estonians win most years. I was a little disappointed to discover that the competitors don’t have to be married, or even a couple; you can borrow someone else’s spouse, although I suppose this is in keeping with the spirit of the contest’s origins.

  The race itself turned out to be a kind of Japanese-game-show-style steeplechase, with the men and their female cargoes racing in a time-trial relay around a 200-metre course featuring various hurdles and water hazards. It was hard to tell whether this was a serious athletic event or pantomime: some competitors wore fancy dress (Asterix and Obelix, the Smurfs), others had clearly trained with some dedication.

  There were interesting variations on how to carry the wives: some male runners favoured the straightforward piggyback, some employed a fireman’s lift, while others opted for an undignified arrangement – like something rejected from an early draft of the Kama Sutra – in which the woman was slung, head pointing downwards, over the man’s shoulders, her legs straddling his neck and her face bouncing off his backside. The latter was especially ill-advised when it came to the water hazard as the ‘wife’ would find her head submerged for some moments while the man waded slowly to the other side.

  The crowd, dressed in cut-down jeans and sandals with socks, bellies bulging beneath T-shirts (also the men), watched the proceedings in near-silence, slowly munching their way through bags of fresh peas and downing plastic beakers of beer.

  In the beer tent after the first race, I caught up with one of the organisers (he may have been the mayor, I never did find out).

  ‘Who won?’ I asked him, trying to make polite conversation.

  ‘Who cares?’ he said, and drained his glass.

  I noticed that by far the toughest part of the race was not the actual carrying of the wives, or even the obstacles (although both would have defeated me), but the fact that, after each major hurdle, the wife was passed like a baton to another member of the team, and before this could happen the previous member of the relay had to drink a bottle of fizzy water. This sounds innocuous enough, but it would appear that when one is gasping for breath having run as fast as one can over 80 metres carrying an adult female, and then wading up to one’s waist through ice-cold water, a bottle of water takes on barrel-like proportions. Several men were almost defeated by it altogether, spewing frothing liquid out of their nostrils as they drank before regurgitating it all on the track. This undignified Strokkur-esque ejaculation at last prompted some kind of a response from the largely silent spectators. They loved this bit. Some almost allowed themselves a slig
ht smile. Here in the Finnish boondocks, watching a man’s head explode due to an over-hasty intake of carbonated water passed for a pleasant summer afternoon’s entertainment. And I can’t really argue with that. We had a great time.

  The prominent role of women in society – whether in government or enduring an undignified circuit of a running track with their faces rebounding off Pappa Smurf’s backside like a rubber door-knocker – is one of the many ways in which, superficially, Finnish society appears to resemble its neighbouring Scandinavian lands (though not the wife-carrying – I think it is fair to say that is uniquely Finnish). But there are lingering doubts about whether Finland really is Scandinavian, or even Nordic for that matter.

  As we have seen, in some senses Finns are almost über-Scandinavians, with their high-context homogeneity, reticence, openness and trustworthiness, their welfare state, and fondness for booze and salty licquorice. As Roman Schatz says: ‘They uphold a society which is surprisingly pluralistic, surprisingly liberal – you can belong to any minority you want, sexual, political, religious, and they leave you in peace. Freedom of speech is 100 per cent: nobody gets in trouble for saying anything. It is a really open culture.’ All very Scandinavian, but Russia’s political and cultural influence should never be underestimated and, in more recent years, Finland has increasingly looked across the Baltic to Estonia and towards the EU for trade, comradeship and cheap alcohol.

  It will be interesting to see what effect the rise of the nationalistic True Finn party will have on Finland’s relationship with its neighbours in the coming years. The party wants to sever ties with Europe; it also has a clear fellowship with the right-wing parties in Norway, Sweden and Denmark, and no great affection for Russia, so perhaps Finland will embrace its Nordic-ness to a greater extent in the future.