Yesterday (the last day of August) my wife was saying that this is the last day of summer. As, at the time, it was about 12C and the sun was occasionally shining this seemed somewhat incomprehensible to me, but as with so many things she was right.

This morning when I got up to go to work it was 3C (37F) and I realised that I would have to sit in the car with the motor running for at least a minute to warm it up before setting off for work.

In other words it was already the time to move the inside heater and cable to the car and start plugging it to the timer overnight.

If that isn't a clear indication that the summer is over, I don't know what is.

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.

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.