I've just spent two weeks in a summer cottage about halfway up Finland so I'm planning to write a few posts comparing varying things between that part of the country and the Helsinki area.

But first those Americans and Russians ..

Most of those two weeks the weather was miserable and so despite the luxury of the summer house I ended up doing a lot of reading and finally worked my way through the books I had brought with me to the one that I bought because I ought to read it. (Actually it was bought when I was on a course in Turku and staying overnight and had thus spent rather too long in the bookshop.)

This was a Penguin book with some of the "Letters from America" of Alistair Cooke, who - for those of you who haven't been tuned to the BBC World Service for the past going on for forty years like me - broadcast for about fifty years a weekly, extremely well-written and intelligent "Letter from America" of about 15 mins length. This book contained a selection of the best ones.

I was reading one of the early ones (it's the sort of book you turn to a page at random and then read that "letter" from the start) when I realised how true one long passage is of the US Americans even to this day. You'll no doubt notice as I did the parallels to Iraq at once.

"Americans are not particularly good at sensing the real elements of another people's culture. It helps them to approach foreigners with carefree warmth and an animated lack of misgiving. It also makes them, on the whole, poor administrators on foreign soil. They find it almost impossible to believe that poorer peoples, far from the Statue of Liberty, should not want in their hearts to become Americans. If it should happen that America, in its new period of world power, comes to do what every other world power has done: if Americans should have to govern large numbers of foreigners, you must expect that Americans will be well hated before they are admired for themselves."

That was written on the 6th of May 1946! Before I was born in fact.

As for the Russians the story there is more mundane.

Apart from reading, I spent some of the rainy periods watching the TV. It was a good, new, colour flat screen TV (if small) but the only channels were the standard Finnish channels that you can get without any cable or satellite connection. So, as it was Olympics time there wasn't much choice and I ended up glancing at "sports" I rarely bother with. What I do however always watch are the athletics events and one of those was the women's javelin - which Finnish TV to their credit showed in full even though the sole Finnish competitor hadn't quite (1.5 meters) made it to the final.

It was a monster battle between a Russian and a Czech and the Czech (ranked higher) finally won right at the last breath with her final throw. Afterwards she was interviewed by a Finnish TV guy. She first pointed out that this was an important day in Czech history because it was the 40th anniversary of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia (something that was well known in Finland because the Finns are still proud of protesting - in an age otherwise known for being very careful not to upset the Russians - against that invasion in large numbers [of which I was a part as I was in Helsinki working as a trainee that summer and took the daughter of my landlord with me as she was keen to go but not alone] and the papers were full of details of the Finns, now high up in politics, who were student leaders at the time).

She then went on to say something like. "There I was on this historic day and I was second to of all people a Russian. I knew I just had to get past her for the whole of the Czech Republic and somehow found the strength to make a throw that beat her."

They then showed a repeat of that final throw and this time around I noticed that the other competitor who immediately rushed up to congratulate her was a Pole. It didn't surprise me.

It was odd because at the time the Olympics were happening the Russians were charging around in their tanks in Georgia and yet in an interview with a Georgian girl about competing with a Russian, she had said roughly that it wasn't *her* fault so why should I be nasty to her.

A strange contrast.