As I've reported before, in Finland cars park mainly in the open at night rather than in garages which makes it almost essential that there is a way to heat them. That way is to have internal heaters (and car motor heaters) that are powered by electricity provided by a parking meter like post with a timer that you connect you internal heater (via an outlet at the front of your car) to.

I've found that it's wise to use this system any time when the temperature is likely to go below +5C (40F) during the night as then you have both a warm engine and a warm interior.

This year I finally stopped using the system for good around the end of May and of course it then took another 6 weeks or so to get round to taking the heater and cable out of the car.

This morning, only 3 weeks later, I could have done with it again. When I got to the car to drive to work it was just 7C (43F) and had probably been less during the night. Even *inside* the office it feels freezing today.

Now Finns look forward every year to their summer. A time away from the coldness and darkness of the long winter. Usually it's worth staying in Finland for reasonable weather - yet never too hot with temperatures usually around 25C (72F).

Well this year we had about 4 days of good weather (at a time with maybe 2 other odd days that weren't bad) and the rest of the so-called summer has been a major disappointment.

So if you meet a Finn in a rainy and depressing winter European city this winter, don't be surprised if he's even more depressed (and in need of a drink) than usual. He hasn't this year got the automatic lifting of spirits that the Finnish summer usually brings.

So much for global warning ... or is this yet another of the effects? Little snow in the winter because it's a couple of degrees warmer, so everything stays dark then and yet rotten, cold, weather all summer.

I think I prefered it before.

As far as I can work out, summer this year was last Thursday and Friday.

They were the only days in the five weeks I was off work (in the traditional holiday period for people in Finland) when the temperatures were such that it actually felt hot.

("Hot" in this country means more than 25C so don't start thinking about Athens in July)

By the time I had to go back to work on Monday we'd gone however back to 10C (48F) in the morning and a fairly chilly 20C (64F) in the afternoon with the sun appearing only now and again.

Typical Finnish August weather in fact.

Can it be that those two days were it for this year?

Certainly in the mornings (when I need both a sweater and a coat to make it to the car without catching a cold) it seems like that.

Like many people who finally come to live here my first experience of Finland was in the summer. Being here in the summer always gives you a rose-tinted picture of Finland because it's in those few summer months that Finns smile and occasionally don't walk staring at the ground.

I was luckier than most because that first summer (where I "worked" (= went to office and stayed there between 8 and 4 every day) for 12 weeks in all (with a few days off in the middle for a student trip to Eastern Finland and Leningrad) I was staying in a room in a private flat that was within walking distance of the city centre and even the southern shore of the peninsular (if I walked a lot).

So I noticed Helsinki as a quiet city that was virtually empty of people.

They were all of course most of the time that I got to central Helsinki (i.e. the weekend) somewhere else (in their summer cottages or on the sea somewhere or maybe even at one of the beaches I never found when I was living there that summer).

Well now it's July and it's just the same. Everyone is away - during the week too - and if they are not at their summer houses outside the capital city area or on their boat in some archipelago or other; they are at one of those beaches that I now know about but am too old (and flabby) to visit except off-shore via canoe.

Sometimes however they are at the oddest of places.

I left home at 7:10 this morning (Sunday) thinking I'd get to the golf course (which officially opens at 8) before anyone else was up and I'd have it all to myself.

At first things looked promising. The suburban roads leading to the motorway were empty as always at that time of hour at the weekend; the motorway stretch had just me and a couple of other cars; the stretch of outer ring road had only a few cars more and the country roads closer to the golf course had only that single little red car ahead of me who was sticking to the speed limit and who I was relieved to see the back of when he/she turned off. So for the last 10kms there was just one car, mine.

I then drove past part of the new course. Empty. Happy days.

Only then I pulled into the golf club car park and it was almost full. (The expansion car park was empty but I was thinking maybe two cars and mine not almost full)

What's more it wasn't just single players like me hoping for a quiet empty course. No, there were noisy groups of 3 and 4. Men of course. All looking like ice hockey hooligans. Horrors.

Aside: Finnish men don't talk in normal circumstances but get a group of friends/acquaintances (especially in their mid thirties) doing any kind of sport and they bond by getting extremely noisy and usually are very inconsiderate of anyone around them. (They are admittedly *slightly* better once they've actually started playing golf especially if a stranger has been added to their playing group)

So, if you ever come to Helsinki in the summer, stay there. You'll enjoy a very clean city; waterfronts etc. and you'll have it all to yourselves (and all the people from the various cruise liners on their way to or from St. Petersburg).

All the Finns have taken themselves off - to summer houses; the sea; beaches; AND (to my regret) to the golf courses.

The Center Party is the party that represents by-and-large the rest of Finland. That is, most of its MPs represent rural districts.

Of course once they are MVPs they spend most of their time in Helsinki and become somewhat suspect to the people who elected them.

Not however it would seem suspect enough to not elect them next time.

So we had in the now distant past the case of a Center MVP who when he was a minister was accused of coupling a personal request for a loan to his own company with him as minister granting some aid to the bank in question.

As a result of the doubts about this he was - after a long process - finally kicked out of Parliament (something that has happened only that once in the almost 20 years I have been in Finland). However not long after there were new general elections and he stood again and the people in his rural community elected him back and he turned up again as if nothing had happened.

(He was finally not elected at the last general election, after being re-elected at least once more after that first time.)

The reason I bring this up now is because for the past couple of years (and especially the last year) the Center Party has had a general secretary who has spent most of his time making public statements that are completely out of touch with what the prime minister and other Center Party ministers have been saying publically.

So with him standing for re-election this time, there was an alternative candidate (a former minister - if I remember correctly, one who temporarily replaced a female minister while she was off "work" to have a baby) who stood on a platform of the party secretary working alongside the leader of the party rather than in opposition to him.

Needless to say, the old general secretary was confirmed in office by something like 1200 to 400 votes. Apparently the (mostly rural) voters at the party congress saw him as a representative of traditional Finnish values as compared to the "Helsinki-oriented" views of the party leaders ...

Traditional Finnish values like disloyalty to your party leader, perhaps!

This is the time of year when final year students having earlier taking their final year exams (the results of which are used when deciding who gets to which University or other further education place) get their final score(s).

It's also the time of year when based on those scores there's a league table of all the grammar schools (US: high schools) in the country and of course the competition among schools in the same general geographic area to be higher up the list than each other (even though we might be talking about halfway down the total list) is tough.

(The "dirty tricks?" are coming soon)

Now what seems to happen is that one person (or set of people) marks the tests and another (presumably more qualified) person then checks that the marks given are reasonable and if not can adjust them up or down.

What also seems to happen is that the head teachers are given the preliminary results for their school based on the first set of marks.

One head teacher (female) in a school in the West Coast of Finland noticed that in one subject 19 of her 25 pupils had been marked down by the checker. So she asked the central system who the checker was and found out it was the head teacher (female) from the next school along the coast!

As a result of the suspicion that this downgrading had been done intentionally to cause that person's own school results to have a better chance of being better, someone else was given the job of re-reviewing the same papers. As a result of that 10 of the 19 papers were put back to where they had been.

It does seem that it was a case of "hang the students from that school and their chances of getting to University, I'm going to try to make sure my school is higher up in the lists than the neighbouring school" but unless the second head teacher is taken to court and the matter judged by the lawyers, we're going to have to assume it was all just a coincidence.

At least officially.

Meanwhile I'm not holding my breath that any further action will be taken. This is Finland after all ...

I have cable television and have a digibox connected to the cable system so that I can see the transmissions (nowadays only digital not analogue) on my TV.

The cable tv system has a base set of about 11 stations (mostly Finnish) which you get (for nothing) if your digibox is connected to the cable system, but if you want more stations you need to sign up for one (or more) of various "packages" which the cable company offers where they bundle several (foreign) TCV channels together.

However in order to get those additional stations via your digibox you need to have a card that costs 20 Euros a year which tells the cable company it is you so that it knows which channels to let you watch.

Fine so far. I had a single digibox; put the card in and I got my standard channels and my additional channels.

However now that there are only digital channels available, I would only have one channel available to me at a time (before I had one analog channel and one digitial channel available) so I bought a new digibox with a hard disk that allowed me to record from two channels at a time and watch a third one (provided it was being sent by the same transponder) which to a certain extent solved that problem. My card telling the cable company it was me was of course transfered to that digibox.

The old digibox (now without card) then went upstairs where it was connected to my PC monitor which also has component input so can see TV pictures. Because it didn't have a card, I was restricted to watching only those 11 or so normal channels upstairs and the seven other channels (1 package of W. European language stations) I had access to downstairs weren't available upstairs.

But then I got a mailing from the cable company that said that they now had a "rinnakkais" (=abreast; side-by-side; parallel; even co-existent) card which would allow me to see my cable stations in another room or upstairs by adding this card to a second digibox.

This would cost 10 Euros a year so it seemed like a no-brainer even though the odds were that I would rarely watch those extra 7 stations upstairs.

The first snag was that the local place (a Stockmann store) that sold (as a reseller) the services of that cable company didn't sell that parallel card. That could only be got at one place in the city centre.

So I trapsed off there after work and found there was a massive queue with 30 people before me most of whom seemed to be negotiating new contracts in order to get cheaper recording digiboxes and thus were taking a lot of time about it.

I finally (actually less than an hour) got to one of the assistants and said I wanted a parallel card. Things were going smoothly until he said "you'll want your package on it?" which was a bit odd as why else would I want the darn thing. But this he trumped by saying that "you'll get the 9 Euros (a month) bill for that just as you do today". This second warning that things weren't right got me to react. "Are you saying that I need to pay for the package TWICE?".

That's what he was saying and so suddenly the no-brainer 10 Euros a year became 118 Euros a year just so I *could* record two of those seven channels downstairs while watching a third of them downstairs AND recording a fourth one upstairs. NOT exactly very likely and thus a complete waste of money.

As I'd spent about an hour in that queue, I asked a few questions to make sure I wasn't missing the point here, the main one of which was that if I can see those basic 11 stations without a card, what is the point of me having a parallel card if it doesn't give me access to the stations I've already paid for ?

There was no answer of course except for the fact that if I had a different package it wouldn't cost me the same amount again for use via the second card but would "only"cost me half as much again ...

Still not a convincing offer especially as I don't have (or want) any of those other packages.

So there you are. More than an hour (I had to go home from work via the centre of Helsinki rather than directly) wasted and all because the cable company's advertising of this new service was less than exact ...

I wonder how many people didn't realise they'd be charge twice for the same channel until they got the first bill. If I hadn't been half awake it would have happened to me too.

We've just been off for the yearly visit to Tenerife, the main reason of which is to tank up on sun during a period when Finland generally has none.

My other reason, which I tend not to shout about, is that I need the occasional rest from Finns and Finland (my wife is excluded from this requirement!). So for me the holiday only starts when the Finnish charter company's bus from the airport has arrived at the apartment hotel (and thus there's an end to the endless babble in Finnish from the representative about the "trips" you could make) and I've checked in.

I reduce this time by always being the first to check in - even though this time there were (shock/horror) 39 Finns checking in to the same (large) hotel compared to the usual 6 or so. My method, naturally, I'm not going to divulge here, but suffice it to say that Finns on holiday walk around as slowly as they do in Finland and any tactical brain they have has obviously been dulled by the plane journey. As (nearly) always I'd completed check in for us just before the first Finns had arrived at the check-in desk with their luggage.

Usually that's it. We have one of the same blocks of rooms as every year (an e-mail several weeks ahead of arrival works wonders) and from there you go directly to the reception and out of the building rather than having to walk through the hotel complex every time. However this time "our" apartments were not available until later in the stay and so we had a new apartment elsewhere in the complex which seemed to be in mini Finland judging by the conversations we heard in the stairs and in the chairs outside that building not to mention in the cafeteria the outside part of which we had to walk through too.

Not good then for people "needing a rest from Finns".

Anyway after a week or so we finally escaped and were back to our normal apartment in a Finn-free area.

However when the holiday was over and it was time to fly back to Finland, I noticed that a) I was glad to be coming back and b) I was very happy to be on a Finnair flight (even a charter one) with the typically very capable (if not particularly good looking) air stewardesses. An efficient baggage handling system and then a good airport taxi service at the Helsinki end completed the picture.

So ignore for at least a month or so any of my mutters about non-moving Finns blocking slow-moving escalators and slow-moving Finns with large trolleys doing their best to block my speedy way through food stores. I like them really ...

(But why can't they learn to stand on the right and to leave trolleys not exactly in the middle of passages ....)

Finnish TV showed a documentary at a prime time at the weekend that was probably made for the international audience as, despite being made by Finns, it had an English soundtrack with the English Neil Hardwick (Cambridge graduate; ex Finnish TV talk show host; occasional actor; TV and theatre director and ex-columnist in the Finnish Time/Der Spiegel equivalent) providing the sound.

It was about - what else (everybody sigh) - the sauna. Again.

My Finnish newspaper said before it was aired that it went on (ca 50 mins) for far too long and they were right. The 30 mins they suggested would have quite enough as it jumped from history to present day and back again virtually ad infinitum.

However the reason for this blog item is the soundtrack. There was a sort of underlying meaning to the way Neil Harwick read his words that gave at least me the impression that he was telling the people able to spot the nuances "yes, this is cr*p isn't it". [No doubt the Finnish people behind the film hadn't a clue.]

This if nothing else made the whole thing mildly amusing and certainly without that soundtrack the whole thing would have been boring in the extreme - do we really need to know how many saunas the Finnish UN peacekeepers built in the Golan Heights, Sinai; Gaza Strip etc. etc. ?

Oh yes, and if you are imagining lots of female breasts on show, don't. This is a Finnish documentary after all about an almost holy Finnish institution, you'll find more in any 80s German Krimi such as Derrick (or of course any 60s Finnish cinema film with Jörn Donner).

I've forgotten most of the details but the state organisation that deals with foreigners in Finland has had its name changed to reflect its supposedly new focus on customer friendliness.

The idea is that foreigners trying to get permission to live and work in Finland will in future be treated as "customers" rather than (hidden subtitle of the newspaper piece on that) as dirt.

We'll see how that idea plays out ...

That change happened at the New Year so it came too late for a couple of very qualified Russian researchers who according to the Swedish-speaking paper here (Hufvudstadsbladet) yesterday finally gave up after 14 years of barely being accepted here.

The tale is interesting because cases of Black Africans with doctorates who could only get jobs in the sorting office of the Post Office have been folk lore for years, but these are people working in a University environment who look like Finns.

The man and his wife moved to Finland in 1994 because the man - who was then working in Portland, Oregon - was offered a post at the University of Turku.

During the entire period of time until 2005 he was offered only a series of short-term contracts and his position was never made permanent. In 2005 he was told there no longer was a short-term contract and since then "he has worked without pay". What happened in 2005 was that he had requested to be paid the same rate as his fellow Finnish researchers, many of which had lesser qualifications (and, according to one comment in the article, didn't work as hard). The inference of course was that it was this requested to be treated as equal that had led to a sudden lack of a follow-up contract.

Meanwhile his wife wasn't allowed to work at all for the first couple of years before finally being granted the kind of visa that allowed this and then she too became a researcher. In the early 2000's she applied to be a Finnish citizen and had her otherwise valid application rejected because the state organisation (probably the same one that is now going to be customer friendly ....) had not accepted the qualifications of the person (at the University) who had certified that the woman spoke a "state of Finland" language (probably Swedish in her case rather than Finnish hence the above construction - either are however acceptable in Finnish law). Her appeal against this had now been (after 2 years) accepted but that only meant that she would have had to apply again.

(In the meantime the daughter (26) now working as a researcher in Brussels, but as far as I can gather with her base still in Turku - and with a degree from the Swedish-speaking Unversity there ("Åbo Akademi") had been granted Finnish citizenship earlier with no problem.)

Now that girls parents were moving back to the States, fully aware that, if they had stayed there in 1994, by now the man would long have had tenure at some US University.

It's hard for me to relate directly to this. Certainly in my previous company I was mostly treated well and as far as I know had a salary that didn't differ that much from other people with my experience. However salary isn't everything and what I have noticed is that I haven't been used for things that it would have been more logical to use me for rather than a Finn.

In that previous company, I had been the only IT person who had been involved with the entire course of a proposed purchase of a ready-made software application from a US company and had been used throughout (in addition to having a normal IT role) as a link between the Americans and the Finns. Then came the time to visit the US company and ten people were sent from my company for a week to S. Carolina - five from IT and five users. Needless to say (considering the subject here) I wasn't one of them. A couple of the IT people (and some of the users) had never even talked / listened to the Americans when they had (often) come to Finland; nevertheless they were sent to the US.

Similarly when my present company was taken over by a British-based more international company, I expected that I would be used in some kind of role for the transition projects. I wasn't. All the members of the transition projects were Finns and some of them (as I heard when I was located near a tele-conferencing room) had poor English. Nevertheless no thought was given to using someone like me as a bridge.

I'm not sure what we can blame for this. These days it is popular to say that Finland needs qualified immigrants yet at the same time there is either a reluctance to employ non-Finns in jobs which match those qualifications or a reluctance to accept any different approaches to working than standard Finnish approaches. I remember when many years ago I went for a job in Germany and the boss there said that he liked the combination of British and German IT people - roughly because the British wanted to do everything quickly with little or no planning and the Germans wanted to plan, and plan, and plan; thus the combination produced good work in a reasonable time. This wouldn't in my opinion happen here. any attempt I've made to work in non-Finnish ways and perhaps more effective ways has either been ignored or has been shot down in flames.

(In Finland it seems the concept of testing boundaries isn't known. Instead of a gentle rebuke when you in effect poke your foot just over the line (so you stop!), nothing happens. So you move the whole leg across ... and nothing happens. And so it goes on until your entire body is across the line and Bang! you are threatened with dismissal. True story.)

(Another thing that has happened to me twice (at least, I noticed it particularly twice) is that (again in my previous job) steps were taken while I was on holiday to reverse things that affected me. In one case I had spent a lot of time creating and constantly refining an Excel model that proved beyond all shadow of a doubt that buying a third-generation SAN system from H-P was better (for all reasonable variations of parameters ) over a three to five year period than buying a second-generation IBM SAN system where initial costs were lower but where maintenance started earlier and a second system would be needed earlier (etc.). When I came back after holiday my boss had replaced my model with a different extremely simple spreadsheet which ignored all parameters and just simply listed the rival quotes for Year 1. That same boss had a year earlier agreed with me before my holiday a division of work with a Finn only to announce publically on the day I was back (with me hearing this then for the first time) that two/thirds of what had been agreed was my responsibility were to be dealt with by the other person. I don't know if this is part of the same Finnish trait (as in the testing boundaries story) of not wanting to face up to unpleasantness or not.

Whatever, I look forward with interest to seeing whether renaming a state organisation will have any real effect on the "customer-friendliness" of the Finns staffing it. Somehow I doubt it.

At 8:30 *AM* I'll be going to the office "party" of the company I work for. They will be serving porridge and there will be no doubt a short pep-talk from the divisional boss.

We also yesterday got our "Christmas present". It was a book token that had to be used for one of 8 books all of which were in Finnish.

Both are thus better than nothing (my Finnish wife got to pick a book) but not exactly worth writing about.

So why do I ?

Simply because it reminded me of the norm in my companies in Germany. Typical of that time were four things.

1. There was an extra month (or month and a half) salary at Christmas time. (Beats a book token for a single book ...)

2. Each working group had a restaurant lunch in December (during the week) paid for by the company. Food and wine/beer - lasting about 90 mins.

3. The place where we ate our normal office lunch had a special meal with free (good) wine.

4. There was an evening out somewhere for all the company - food, dancing.

2, 3, and 4 beat a bit of porridge and half-an-hour break from work, don't they !?

P.S. I was wrong. The short pep-talk was about a sentence with no pep. But we had to wait about 20 minutes before the porridge (which was rather good and which in England would be called "rice pudding") because of first a couple of interlude music piano solos (from an ex-boss of mine) and then several Christmas songs from a small choir. When I then woke up we could go and collect our porridge.

P.P.S. It's now almost three years since a group of ca 100 people from my previous company were outsourced to this one and today - just as with any occasion for the whole company - it was still 100% obvious that we would all sit together (free choice of table) rather than with the people we now work with. I leave you to draw your own conclusions about the respective company spirit.

Much as I'd prefer to avoid the issue altogether and wish it had never happened, yesterday's shooting in a grammar school (lukio) in a semi-rural area north of Helsinki happened and needs at least to be mentioned here.

I first heard of it when I got home and turned on the BBC which I suppose indicates that no-one was discussing this at work and probably most people were unaware of it until they got home and turned on the regular news broadcasts.

After the BBC picked it up in their one hour news program and had included an interview with a Finnish doctor in charge of a quick response team and who seemed to be purposely trying to be as vague as possible, I turned on the TV and none of the Finnish channels had a special program on this (although of course there were some teletext reports).

When the news finally came on there was yet another interview with a person who seemed to be avoiding giving details and he then finally gave up and said something like "the police haven't told me what I am allowed to say and what not".

Meanwhile the statement on the situation from the police included a phrase like "there seems to be no more danger of any more shooting".

At the time this statement was issued the shooter (to remind you of at the figures late yesterday: 8 dead (headmaster; 5 girls; 2 boys); ca 20 injured some critical), who had shot himself in the head, was in critical condition and would that night die of his wounds. (The daily free paper had the headline next day  "shooting suspect dies" - carrying on this cautiousness with words that has been a (negative) feature of all of this.)

So the police seem to have forgotten the need for openness but the government system swung into action and within hours there were hot lines set up for the counseling of both school children and parents; a press conference from the government etc. (as well as from the police which I mostly missed but I guess they were still blocking and being evasive).

So Finland is being as efficient as usual but I have to wonder about the police. It's hardly their fault this happened so why all the evasiveness when dealing with it. Why not just say right out "The shooter has shot himself in the head and is in the hospital in critical condition" rather than "it seems there is no danger of more shooting" and why still call someone identified by masses of co-students a "suspect" ? It's beyond me but then I'm not in the police.

P.S. The eight shot dead by "the suspect" are of course a tragedy but I was using early figures when saying above "20 others, some critical". One is said to be critical while they rest are said to have cuts from glass (from jumping out of windows ??).

Some people are very sad at the moment and wondering to themselves "why didn't I wait".

These are the people who have just traded in their car (perhaps a 5-10 year old one) and bought a new car.

They have namely just lost a lot of money compared with doing that in 2008 (or in the rest of 2007 but valid from the 1st of January 2008).

The reason is that the level of car tax has been drastically changed.

But first most of you probably need to know about Finnish car taxes. Finland has a two-tiered system of taxes on any new cars bought here. There is the standard Value-Added tax (over 20% - I can never remember what exactly, 22% at the moment I think or is it 24?) that applies to everything, but there's also a special Car Tax.

This car tax used to be something like 122% (yes, really) and long ago the Finnish government realised that as a part of the Europe Union this wasn't going to work for long so they a few years ago decided on a plan of gradually reducing it.

The first reduction was about 10% (so car tax was then something like 110%) and all that happened was that within several months the car companies increased their pre-tax prices for cars being sent to Finland and most of that "gain" was lost.

So governments (quick to learn in this case) obviously realised that gradual change of tax levels wasn't going to work and started wondering about alternatives.

Now, several years later, the change has come and it's a big one. It also came without warning and is valid from the beginning of 2008.

The rate of car tax is now related to the amount of emissions from the car. So a small car with a diesel motor has typically the smallest amount of tax and efficient small engines (such as VWs new 1.4 TSI engine) are "better" than larger engines producing the same amount of power but with higher emissions.

The change in rates is dramatic and it also means that most cars have a lower car tax rate than before (so savings are said to be between 1 and 5 thousand Euros per car for most models) with only a few large cars with large engines having (heavily) increased car tax levels.

What this also means is of course than the price of used cars goes down - especially that of those reasonably large cars than have not seen their sticker price increased (as there will be from 2010 increased yearly road tax charges for them).

So imagine if you may someone like me (in 4 years in my case) who is planning to trade in a 10 year old car for a new one.

Done last month I'd have got a small allowance for my old car and will have paid todays price (at 110% car tax + 22% normal tax) for a new car. I won't have considered the yearly car tax when deciding which new car to buy because last month the yearly road tax was the same for all cars.

Done on the 2nd of January 2008, I'll still get the small allowance for the old car (because at that level 10% makes little difference) but I'll probably chose a car that has its price reduced by anything between 3 and 5 thousand Euros (and it will be one that will not have a high yearly tax rate from 2010).

No wonder people who did such deals last month are not happy today.

The ones that are of course are the people who bought large petrol-guzzling SUVs. They are in some cases saving tens of thousands of Euros (and no doubt there will be a rush to sign contracts for that kind of car in what's left of this year - no wonder the car sales people are smiling).

P.S. One of the people responsible for the public transport system in the Helsinki area has already pointed out one of the risks with much lower car prices - it suddenly becomes feasible to have more cars per family. I take that even further and say that the risk is that we have large increased population of young drivers. I've seen when I was in Germany that 18-25 year old males (usually males) are involved in a large percentage of car accidents and that hasn't been a major factor here because of the cost of getting into the car market (as high initial prices obviously rip down into high prices for used cars except the really old - and they need expensive repairs). Bad times ahead and not just for the bus companies.

In a quiet moment recently (and don't ask me why, but it was while I was waiting for an installation to finish!) I checked what would happen if I typed "Alexander Stubb" into Google.

Not surprisingly this active MEP's own site came first and it was followed by a wikipedia entry

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Stubb

which contained one glaring mistake ...

When talking about Alexander Stubb's languages (which are many and good) it said that he "spoke Swedish, English and German in addition to French and his native Finnish".

WRONG, completely wrong !

Alexander Stubb is a member of Finland's Swedish-speaking minority and therefore his native language is Swedish.

Naturally he also speaks Finnish because he comes from the part of Finland where Finnish is the dominant language, but his native language is Swedish and he almost certainly (not mentioned in this article which started at graduating from an American college) went to schools in Finland where the teaching is done in Swedish (and where Finnish is the first "foreign" language).

Of course this makes me wonder who wrote the article. They seem to have found a good source of information because the article is detailed enough but the article can't have been written by a Finn because even the many Finnish-speaking people who voted for him in the MEP elections were all well aware that he came from the Swedish-speaking minority (and it didn't bother them).

If you now go to the site you will hopefully (unless this has been "corrected" back) see an accurate text as far as languages go, because naturally I corrected it (along with a few minor typing errors).

P.S. It's nice to be right on occasion. One of the references after the article itself is to Alexander Stubb's abridged c.v (on his own web site). In it you will find something that was considered unimportant to the (US American?) writer of the main text in that he/she while including Mr Stubb's matriculation from an American high school (in 1986) didn't bother to mention that he two years later matriculated from a school in Finland. That school according to Mr Stubb himself was "Gymnasiet Lärkan, Helsinki, Finland" Readers with Swedish will know that "Gymnasiet" is the Swedish word (including a "the") equivalent to the German "Gymnasium" (the Finnish word is "lukio") , and that Lärken (also Swedish - for "the lark") is a well-known Swedish school in Helsinki.

I put three new computer books that I had in duplicate on the desk of a guy who I knew was interested in the subject (with a note explaining the gift).

He works mainly in a different location so I didn't see him for several weeks (during which time the books disappeared), but I did expect to get a thank you note by e-mail.

Did I ? Of course not.

I was then there when he by chance was in the same location. I left the subject of the books until the late afternoon to give him the chance to thank me for them. Nothing. Even when I finally mentioned them towards the end of the day, all I got was a confirmation that he had them. No thanks.

The next time I had a book copy to give away I of course decided that someone else would get it. Again someone for whom the book would be useful. So this time I asked this new guy first if he'd like a signed copy of "Real World Computing SharePoint 2007" (which is what this one was) and he said he would. I sent it by internal post with a personal (and nice) dedication.

Did I get a "Thank You" message by E-mail? Of course not.

If I ever come across him, will he thank me then ? I doubt it.

P.S. Two and a half weeks later I got a thank you e-mail (for the single book). Maybe he's been on holiday ...

All experienced drivers know the feeling. Some places are so well known to you that you drive by memory.In particular you turn at the same point.

Now naturally you have your eyes open so you'll notice having started your turn that a bicycle is coming and you'll have to let it past first but otherwise the turn is just automatic.

Occasionally, though, events conspire to make this not a good idea.

Today was one such day for me.

I drive to work at such a time that the roads are almost empty which leads to all the cars driving at ca 10kms above the speed limit (which tends to be within the area the police let go). This morning, though, I was in a 50 km/hour limit behind a woman who was driving at 40 km/hour so by the time I pulled into work I was a couple of minutes later than usual (and more irritated).

So that was one factor.

The second factor was that one job has finished and so rather than driving into the parking garage as I have done for the past n Tuesdays I was driving into the parking area at ground level as all I was doing was filling an Ikea bag with stuff from my desk and then heading for my normal office in another building rather than working for the day there. Of course I could have also put the car in the parking garage anyway (there's a lift direct to the office) but for some reason (probably saving a couple of minutes driving time) I didn't - more's the pity.

The third factor was that just as I arrived near to the parking area a truck was leaving so I turned left at my usual remembered point just behind it.

The fourth and crucial factor was that in the six months since I had last driven to the parking area they had put up an additional high curb stone to slow traffic coming into the parking area. So you had a normal curve of curb stone (from before) and then an additional *straight* one.

Because of the truck I didn't see it.

Result one tyre/tire that immediately blew and is naturally irreparable.

Luckily I am a member of the Finnish Car Association and have paid extra for free roadside assistance and that includes one tyre change a year. Also luckily I had no difficulty in noticing what the problem was right away (!) and had a row of parking spaces I could put the car in.

So it was grab the mobile phone; ring the number on the card I have with me for that additional service and wait (in -2C so not so bad). After about forty minutes a large towing truck arrived and the guy changed the tyre at no cost to me.

Good, efficient, Finnish service.

So now I have no spare so I'm going to put forward the change to winter tyres; have the same spare in the boot over the winter and then in spring when it's time to change back I'm going to have to bite the bullet and buy two new summer tyres.

But for now at least the panic is over - at least until I notice steering problems caused by that almighty bump (I haven't so far, but I've only driven about 1km). Now that I really hope doesn't happen. Paying for 2 new tyres three months after buying 4 new tyres is one thing. But paying major money for steering work because they added a curb stone in a stupid place is another.

P.S. I think I'm OK on the steering issue. Looking back at it I think I only just clipped the edge of the curbing stone with my left tyre. certainly there was only one bump not two so only the front left tyre went over the stone not the rear left.

Note that this is just a single row of curbing stones (serving no useful purpose apart from making your turn more difficult and thus (if you see it!) slower) so your car goes up onto the stone then immediately down after it. In other words I'd have noticed if I'd gone up down then up down again. So, thinking about how a car turns I was obviously very unlucky - turning a fraction of a second later and the whole car would have missed the curbing stones completely; a few fractions of a second earlier and I might well have hit them straight(er) on with no burst tyre.

Still I prefer to use my bad luck up on such a thing. A group of colleagues from a previous work place were in a car waiting normally at a traffic light when a truck ran into them. Result: one dead; one off for six months and one off for a year; back for a few months and then forced to retire because of ill health (at about 45). I'll bet they spent more than one twitchy day (which is what I'm having) wondering what if they had set off earlier; not slowed for the light etc. etc.)

P.P.S. I was back at head office yesterday (I walked!) and had a good look at the set of curbstones. Although the curbstones were mostly rounded at the edges, there was one place (or a building error?) that had probably been hit earlier so that one stone wasn't plane with the rest of them which left just one place where there was a nasty very pointed edge free. Guess what I must have hit ? So it really was a question of a fraction of a second in that turn. Bad luck.

We reached another couple of stages in the approach to winter.

First there started to be items in the newspapers about changing to winter tyres/tires and the various car magazines had their yearly test of winter tyres/tires,.

The rules in Finland are "simple but". Simple is that you must change to winter tyres by the 1st of December. Simple too is that the first day you are allowed to change is the 1st of November. Simple that is but for the fact that you can change to winter tyres earlier than that "if weather condtions demand it".

This has led to the commonly known statement if you are stopped by the police (and my experience of the Finnish police is that you have to be doing something seriously wrong if they stop you while *they* are moving (speed traps and alchohol road blocks excluded therefore) and hearing that you have winter tyres on 5 days ahead of the deadline isn't likely to stop them in their tracks) you just have to say that you are driving to Lapland at the weekend. What could be more "weather conditions demand it" than that?

Anyway that was one sign. The other was more mundane. For the first time since summer I had to connect my car to the electric motor/car warmer in the middle of the morning. Usually I leave it on overnight when there is a risk of frost and it is set to start heating at around 5 for two hours and then stop. Today I knew I was going to leave at 10:40 and didn't bother so at 9:30 I had to head to the car port and plug the thing in (and change the time so it would start right away).

I've followed the way trades unions negotiate in Finland with interest and over the years I've noticed one thing.

The fattest and ugliest trades union bosses are always the ones who are the most extreme.

I suppose it has something to do with them not being loved for themselves but only for the pay rises they screw out of the companies.

The previous example of this was the guy behind the paper-makers strike in the summer of 2006 (2005?) which must go down on record as the most unnecessary ever because they were trying to stop the inevitable closing down of money-losing mills.

Usually the theory has applied to men as most trades union bosses *are* men.

But occasionally you can apply the theory to women and this year we have a real humdinger.

The trades union Tehy (led by a very large woman) has just demanded a pay rise of 24% over 28 months where everyone else has been satisifed with a still high ca. 10-12% over 2-3 years.

Now everyone is aware that the nurses (who they represent among others) need their pay adjusted upwards, but not all at once.  A thinner better-looking woman might have realised this and taken a sensible long-term approach but not of course the leader they have.

All she's achieved so far is to lose most of the public goodwill her members had and the method of "strike action" which is mass resignations isn't likely to get that public goodwill back as hospitals lose all their ability to cure.

Most nurses are nothing like her size. Pity their leader isn't too.

P.S. I wonder at these 12% (over 3 years) figures. They then say 3.5% in the first year; 2.5 in year's two and three. (something like that anyway). Wouldn't that in most countries be called a 3% pay rise ? Is it just a way for the companies to give relatively little and the trades union people to say "look how much we got for you" ?

P.P.S Of course these opinions of female beauty (and male uglyness) are mine only, as is the above "theory". I remember going to dances at University with a guy from Nigeria because his idea of a fine looking woman was a somewhat (!) larger woman than mine and so neither of us had problems in deciding which girl (of 2) was for each of us.

They said there might be snow in Southern Finland today (12th October !) - now doesn't that make you want to come and live here?! - and I suppose we can say they were just right.

I went namely to the shops in Tapiola and more specifically to Stockman where it was the third day of their semi-annual Yellow Days where they *theoretically* have specially low prices and the store is packed.

Even it seems on a Friday morning, although my wife tells me if was even fuller on the first day (Wednesday) at about 10. She wondered where all the people came from because the crowd wasn't composed of obvious pensioners but of people you'd expect to be at work or at school at that time.

These days I go once; buy a packet of biscuits that you maybe can't get during the rest of the year and that's about it. As I wrote above the prices are only theoretically cheaper. I saw a TV in their catalogue and went straight to the web site of a computer/video store to check it out and it was cheaper in that store by a couple of hundred.

Where was I? Oh yes, snow. We finally left the Yellow Days and headed across the small walking area outside in the direction of the second department store (during the Yellow Days at Stockmann, empty!) and then we noticed that the rain we had been walking under to get to the bus to get to Tapiola had now changed to snow. Very wet snow that wouldn't have stuck on the walking area's surface even if that hadn't got heating under it, but snow (of a sort) nonetheless.

It didn't last long there but a bit further away from the sea (and thus a bit colder) maybe it lasted a bit longer because there were a few reports on the radio of the inevitable minor traffic accidents.

Not a problem for me. The bus got us home again and on the same ticket too (valid up to 60 mins after getting in the first bus - or is it 75 mins, I can never remember).

P.S. The comments are about the fact that "Yellow Days" is wrong and the translation is in fact "Crazy Days" or "Mad Days". Yellow is the prominent colour with them packing everything you buy in very garish Bright Yellow bags with dark black letters and the personnel wear Yellow T-Shirts and the ceiling hangings are bright yellow too. (An easy mistake to make, in other words )

No, there's still no snow and, No, the temperatures weren't below zero overnight so I didn't have to put the car on the heater (but I did anyway because it's really nice to get into a warmed up (motor and inside) car at 6 o'clock (AM) rather than one that isn't).

In fact the real sign that summer is over and that winter is just around the corner is that I didn't have a hat on when going for a walk at about 7PM yesterday (or even in my pocket) and I realised i should have had.

This also makes me realise that I also have a number of hats (bobble hats) of different thickness and covering different areas (more/less) of my head (and of course easier or less easy to push into a pocket). They don't take up quite the space of those 10 or so jackets, but I should have mentioned them yesterday I suppose.

By the way, did I mention the different material; thicknesses and length of my scarves .... ?

The last blog (in August) was about the signs that the summer is really over.

It's worth considering that there are benefits to the fact that there are four clear seasons here.

The main one being I suppose that you don't need the Christmas holidays to remind you that you are getting a year older.

The disadvantage is that you have to keep an amazing amount of clothes to be able to cope with them all. I must have about 10 jackets/coats because there has to be something for 20C or so (0F) and there also needs to be something for plus 25C (72F) but windy and just about everything in between. (Not to mention underwear, sweaters etc. ...)

At the moment we are in the short autumn period. This seems this year to mean that it rains ALL the time. Today it excelled itself and any coat would have been soaked in minutes and any umbrella (apart from a very large golf one) would have meant that your head might have stayed dry but not much of the rest. (I drove)

The other fun part of this autumn period is that it always ends with an unexpected snow storm leading to chaos on the roads. (Chaos being somewhat of an overkill description compared to the situation in the UK or even in most parts of Germany when it snows for the first time - has anyone else spent several hours heading up the hill to the Roman ruins after Bad Homburg that first snow day? - but even so).

I've written before here that this unexpected snow storm always seems in the Helsinki area to occur on the 1st of November, but yesterday (and it was only the 7th of October!) the TV weather forecast promised snow for Central Finland on Wednesday and a risk of snow in Southern Finland (which includes us) on Friday/Saturday. I'll believe that when I see it, but if it does come and I'm at work when it happens, the best thing will be just to leave the car here and head home by bus - either that or leave very early or very late. Of course that isn't really an alternative on a Friday (as like most people I need a car at the weekend) so naturally that's when it's going to happen if at all.

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Meanwhile on a completely different note, I see that Daimler-Chrysler have - after an extensive study I would guess, anything else would be very un-germanic - made the bold decision to change their name to, uhum, Daimler.

This reminds me of something a friend sent me about his international company's name change

"Over the last few years we have taken a number of important steps to create a leading European XXXX XXXX company with a strong international network. Read more about what XXXX writes regarding our company name change."

That change (= important step) was a similar one to changing Daimler-Chrysler to Daimler! So now you know why management gets the big bucks ...

 

My wife remarked yesterday when we were out walking and saw a flock of birds (feathered ones that is) that this means summer is almost over.

Not being particularly interested in wild life (the reason I mostly canoe by myself is to avoid those innumerable pauses when some woman in the party (and, yes, it's almost always a woman) wants to stop paddling and look at some bird or animal). a flock of birds isn't the signal of the end of summer for me.

Instead I have more mundane things that warn me summer is almost over.

Starting the car in the morning for instance ...

Summer is over when you have a slight hick before the engines turns over and when you have to sit in it for about half a minute for the engine to warm up properly before you can set off. (Autumn is over when starting without having plugged it (the motor heater) in overnight to the electric supply is running the risk of it not starting at all).

That (slight hick) happened this week ... (so mid-August)

The other sign (as even if i don't look at wild life, I do keep my eyes open when out) is that women by-and-large stop wearing skirts and dresses and go back to trousers. This seems to happen later than the car signs but that's maybe because  most of the skirt wearers  are hoping against hope that the weather will pick up again.

Sometimes it will too. Usually just (see previous blog) as I'm about to travel abroad to catch the sun.

There are lots of ways to survive Finland as a non-Finn. One, I suppose though I've never tried it, is to be permanently drunk knowing that the social system will probably ensure that you have a roof over your head and just about enough money. (In case you were thinking of this life style then even the Finnish social system doesn't cover everyone otherwise there wouldn't be any homeless here would there - and there are, although not begging on the streets I'm glad to say).

The main method is to make sure that you spend the whole summer (a period of (being very generous) roughly June, July, August) here.

I virtually knew that the stay in Finland of a semi-relation of mine was doomed when she arrived with her kids and Finnish husband in August (so summer gone for that year) and announced that she was spending the next summer in Canada. (and it was doomed as she is now back in Canada and the Finnish house is sold)

We foreigners need the entire summer here in order to put up with the winter and also to give us a respite from the less friendly Finns we meet during the long non-summer. (We also need at least a couple of weeks in mid-winter to get a sun boost - and also the above boost too - but that's another story).

You see the summer is when Finland comes into its own. The people are open and friendly - not closed and not at all friendly which they tend to be in the winter if you don't know them. The temperatures are pleasant wihout being overpoweringly hot; lakes and/or sea are close by; walks in the woods are pleasant; the roads are good quality and mostly empty and in fact the whole place seems empty as lots of the inhabitants disappear off into their (these days you can no longer say "primitive") summer cottages and half of the rest go abroad.

Meanwhile your intelligent foreigner if he/she chooses to go abroad at all apart from that winter trip, goes in early May or September in what often turns out to be a vain attempt to extend the summer. (It's amazing how good the weather in Finland is at the beginning of September the one year you decide to go South then - and of course how bad it is when you decide not to)

So there you are. It's simple. Survive Finland and the Finns by being here all summer.

Or in fact do as many Finns do and live abroad the rest of the year. Now that's a thought ...

In most families in Finland both parents work. They can do this because there is a well-established system of day-care centres at reasonable prices.

These reasonable prices come about because the people working in the day-care centres are, by all accounts, despite (as is typical for Finland) being well trained for the job, badly paid.

If all the places in the official day-care centres are taken then there's a second-level option which is private day care. This is something that seems (from my local experience where we've had two such cases) to be done as a side-earner by fairly new mothers on maternity leave with their own newish children.

But back to the local authority day-care centres. They have fairly restrictive rules for dropping off and picking up times which often leads to one parent dropping off a child on the way to work and the other parent picking them up on their way home. It's always amusing when at a seminar with guest speakers from abroad there are suddenly quite a few people (usually men) leaving mid-way through because it's time to pick up the kids. (It's quite handy actually as cover for when the speaker is driving you mad with his German accent or boring speaking style - but don't tell anyone I told you that).

Most day-care centres are shut throughout the entire month of July when the whole country takes holiday from work even if (as in my case) they'd prefer not to. (In my case the company's customers are all off on holiday so there's not much paid work to do for them and thus we are "encouraged" to have summer holidays then too).

However this week is the beginning of August on Wednesday so (by some very peculiar rule thought up by a Mon-Fri fetishist) the day care centres are open on Monday and Tuesday as well despite those days being in July.

(Don't worry, I'm getting to the mad charges)

So my friend's wife, keen to have the final week of her holiday in peace said she'd take their 2 year-old in on Monday. Luckily my friend had his wits about him and she will in fact now take the 2-year-old in first on Wednesday (1st of August).

Why? Because the payment rules for these day-care centres are that even if the child is only there for ONE day in a calendar month, a full monthly charge (ca 200 Euros or 270 US dollars) is made.

This sort of madness is in fact very familiar to me because in Sweden my son was also in day care but his day-care place was only a half-day place (almost everyone else had full day places but for reasons I won't go into here the half-day place was all the local authority would grant in my case). I had to pay as much for a half-day place as I would have paid for a full-day place!

There have been a few things in the papers recently about the difficulty of getting a job in Finland if you don't speak Finnish.

According to a Polish journalist who was sent here (while other colleagues were sent to other EU countries) while people are quite happy to interview you in English they then won't offer you even a cleaning job if you don't speak and write Finnish.

One of the odd things she reported was that having had an interview she was asked to fill in an application form. She couldn't because it was only in Finnish.

My suspicion is that it IS possible to get a job in Finland if you only speak English, but that it has to be a job in your field; has to be for a multi-national with factories in your country (and the desire to send you back there later). In such a case - and provided you interview while you are still in a quality job in your own country, you might avoid this need to speak Finnish.

If however you are already in the country you are firstly only considered suitable for menial jobs and then there's also this Finnish-speaking requirement.

Of course this is being far too general, but I suspect there's a lot of sense in it.

I, on the other hand, almost didn't get a job in Finland when I applied while living in Germany in a quality job, because I did speak some Finnish (which was worse than I thought it was) and expected this to be an advantage. It was only when I'd clearly messed up one interview by making sure that was known, that I decided that future interviews would be in English only which led to me getting a couple of job offers. But if I'd only had one interview, speaking Finnish would have meant that I wouldn't have got a job in Finland. Ironic isn't it?