Starting in a couple of weeks we will be putting up with having no bathroom for six weeks while workmen make a completely unnecessary re-fit that is costing us several thousand dollars.

Are we mad ?

No, the answer lies in the Finnish system of house ownership. (There follows a very rough idea of how this is)

For tax and other reasons houses are often part of a "company". You buy a house and this gives you the equivalent number of shares in the company. The board of the company is other house owners almost always serving for free and for limited periods. The board then (with votes from the houseowners) decides on actions that need to be taken for the good of the entire house stock.

Positive is that if they decide that all houses are to be painted (for instance) the price per house is way less than you would pay yourself and they organise it all.

Negative is when you - but not many other householders - have already renewed your bathroom and then they decide all bathrooms are to be renewed.

You can of course say that you don't want your bathroom done. You still have to pay your share of all the other bathroom renewals so (we have ca 40 houses) everyone (including you) pays 2.5% less and you are the only people without a new bathroom.

So you pay the full amount and put up with having the builders in for six weeks and no showers in that time.

Luckily my wife made a deal with the neighbour who had her showers in our bathroom during the week while I was at work and will now offer the same thing to my wife, while I have showers available (somewhere) at work.

But still, during those six weeks I will be muttering to myself about how crazy that Finnish system sometimes is and wishing I still had that money to do something more useful with.

Just about anything would be more useful.

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P.S. In April 2006. The latest plan is to do nothing to all houses in 2006 but in 2007 to do something about the window frames. We are lucky as the original idea of the (house) board was to replace all the windows as well (which in the case of a friend of my wife's meant almost 12 months with covered windows and a massive bill) but the consultant they (in typical Finnish style) asked to look at their proposal said this wasn't necessary. Good for him. Not of course that I have a clue how much the whole thing will anyway cost next year but I doubt if it will be as much as that bathroom renewal and at least it's *next* year and a genuine improvement. Meanwhile what we really need is a new kitchen but what we've seen is that the first thing people do when they buy a house is to re-do the kitchen (in one case right after the previous owners had just re-done the kitchen prior to selling it!), so that decision really depends on how long we plan to stay here and enjoy that new kitchen. I'm beginning to wonder if all we need to do is change all the cupboard doors.

I spent the weekend with my wife in Turku (Swedish Åbo) in the South-West of Finland.

Turku was the capital of Finland until Helsinki was founded and is therefore a much older city than Helsinki and, despite the fact that most of the buildings there just as in the rest of Finland used to be wooden buildings which tended to vanish now and again in fires, Turku still has a few old stone-based buildings left.

One of those is the cathedral which was built in the 13th Century and was first used in the year 1300.

Usually when my wife decides that going to church is a suitable thing to do on Sunday morning, I decline and stay in bed, but this time the hotel we were staying in was just down the road and the idea of attending a service in a real cathedral more appealing than our local (and very modern) church, so I went.

It was quite an odd service as while following all the usual rituals the Nordic (Lutheran) churches seem to love they also had three different places where the priests (yes, quite a few) did their things from.

I'd better set the scene. A very long central section (left to right) with pillers separating off the two quite narrow side sections. A very high building as befits a cathedral but with only very small plain glass windows almost at ceiling level to give light. (A lack of windows in walls is quite normal in Nordic climates).

Then from back to front four main sections

a) a small entrance section (5%?)

b) a large section (maybe half the length) of church pews facing of course forward.

c) a smaller section (30%?) with rows of normal chairs facing towards the centre

d) steps leading up to an altar section (15%?)

The pulpit was against a pillar with spiral steps leading up to it located between b) and c) [Location 1]

There was another microphone-equipped location with a reading stand at the end of section c) [Location 2] and finally there must have been some kind of microphone in the altar section. [Location 3]

At exactly 10 o'clock an oldish male priest appeared at Location 2 and welcomed everybody in normal words and said who would be doing what and that he would be giving the sermon. He then walked to the side; and walked back towards the main entrance.

Then about five minutes later the church music started and a small procession consisting of a normally clothed woman carrying a cross; two men in suits and two older priests (the same man and woman) and two younger priests (man and woman) [priests in priestly robes] walked slowly past us down the aisle and took seats behind the microphone at Location 2.

The the older woman priest appeared at Location 3 (OK, I missed how she got there - round the back I guess) and started the service possibly using an attached microphone.

Having been there a while, the action moved for the most part to Location 2 except for the sermon itself which was in the pulpit at Location 1 (causing me to look everywhere but in that direction wondering where the sound was coming from).

Finally near the end all four priests appeared at Location 3 and gave communion to what seemed almost the entire congregation. Despite four priests in action this took quite a while.

Then back to location 2 for the final section.

As you can see quite a performance and I suspect one that has been forced upon them by the size of congregations these days which would make the presumably original set of pews all the way from the back to the altar space completely impracticable as even on good days people would be very sparsely located.

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By "rituals" I probably mean something you don't think I mean. I don't mean the carrying of the cross and the walking in. What I do mean is that services always have a very strict order including when people have to stand; when to sit; what replies to make if the priest says something etc.etc.

I was previously married to a Swede and it's exactly the same in the Swedish Lutheran church - it's a particular Sunday so you get handed a printed paper with what to do and what to say and when to do and say it. Only the hymn choice seems to be possible to vary (and I'm not even sure about that).

What I miss is the way in which a Scottish (I was a choirboy in Scotland so attended a lot of services) Church of Scotland vicar could determine the theme of the sermon and build his extracts from the bible around that theme. In the Lutheran church there doesn't seem room for that sort of freedom and personal initiative and at least in Tapiola where I live and in the Turku cathedral there's not just a single priest/vicar but a collective running the show.