When I started this on-and-off series about my impressions of my stay about halfway up Finland, I thought it would be about slow drivers (done that one); cheap houses (started that one - needs to be continued) and the fact that there aren't department stores (to come).

What I didn't expect is that I'd need to write again about a school shooting.

Now the first school shooting - now just less than 11 months ago - was in a nondescript location with no particular character that was close enough to Helsinki to be mainly filled with people who actually wanted to live in Helsinki but couldn't afford to. In other words whereas it was still incomprehensible, you could just about begin to understand the "this can't be life" mentality of the shooter.

In this new case (which was very close to the route I took heading North, being not that far from the Seinäjoki of slow-moving cars I reported on last time) it happened in a genuine small town where the advanced education institute looked to be both modern and in a beautiful location (and how about that amazingly beautiful yet very modern church?!).

Yet here too, in the mind of the shooter life apparently wasn't worth living. In the old days teachers would be watching out for such students afraid that they might commit suicide. These days, it seems, the potential risks are much greater.

So, yes, the prime minister is right that hand guns need to be in shooting clubs under lock and key only - even if i remember that over 10 years ago (last time there was a stock market crash after an upswing, in fact) a woman affected by the crash had left a Helsinki shooting club with a gun belonging to the club and shot people on the street - but isn't it a bit late after this second incident, what have they been doing for the past almost 11 months?

Anyway, with sports bags so large, restricting hand guns to shooting clubs will just mean that the next time use will be made of a hunting weapon. They, apparently, aren't considered to be a problem outside clubs because they are bigger. Believe that if you will.

As for whether there will be a next time. I'm very much afraid that without a very large change in the law, there will be a next time. Now people inclined to behave in this way have TWO examples to imitate not just one.

That's it for that unpleasant subject. Next time I *will* talk about cheaper houses and the lack of department stores.

One of the other things you notice as you drive in Finnish towns that are further up in Finland is that people drive like maniacs.

Well actually not, the problem is that that don't drive like the people I'm used to in the Helsinki region and this can cause problems as they do things which people in the Helsinki region don't do.

One thing they do is drive very slowly.

We were in Seinäjoki for a day on the way up. The entire centre (so the middle plus maybe 1-2 kms in every direction) of the town had a forty kms/hour limit.

Now I imagine that you are thinking of an old town with narrow, crowded streets and imaging this speed limit was justified. Not a bit of it; these were wide boulevards often with space for cars parked on either side of the road AND two lanes still available in each direction. [Aside: they were also VERY empty of traffic]

In Helsinki such roads both don't exist anywhere near the town centre (in fact I can't recollect seeing anything so wide) and if they did exist they would be 50 or 60 limits not 40.

But that's not all. In Helsinki all the traffic would be driving at 10 kms/hour more than the speed limit. Part of this would be to allow for the car's speedometer to show slightly more than the real speed and the rest of it a calculation that the cops wouldn't bother with you if you were a mere 5 kms/hour above the speed limit. [Which - with very few exceptions like driving directly in front of a marked police car - is what is likely to (not) happen.]

In Seinäjoki, despite those amazingly wide roads, the traffic was indeed driving at 40.

Well, that's not that difficult to get used to even if it seems completely mad, but then those cars stop at pedestrian crossings without lights to let people across. Thus giving the driver of the Helsinki car driving behind then a heart attack because he had reckoned that just as in Helsinki the car in front wouldn't stop unless the waiting pedestrian in question happened to be a drop-dead gorgeous blond female (and the driver a healthy male) and even then in 50% of the cases the car in front wouldn't stop.

Because you see in Helsinki (and in the entire Helsinki area) you not only drive as fast as the speed limit says (plus 10% on the meter) but you virtually never stop for anything except a traffic light that has been at red for quite a while before you arrive at it (or another car because Helsinki does have quite a lot of traffic and thus the occasional mini jams)

Whereas it may be true that if you knock over someone crossing a non-traffic-lighted pedestrian crossing it's your fault, pedestrians in the Helsinki area are not prepared to die to prove that the driver is in the wrong so they wait at the side of the road until they can walk across the crossing without even causing oncoming cars to slightly brake.

You naturally get used to this. partly because if old (foreign) habits die hard and you do stop and wave people across, they are likely to regard you with some wariness - if that is they are looking in your direction at all and are not just ignoring you while waiting for a gap in the traffic.

It's the same thing when turning right. If there's no bicycle coming from the right or left (it can be either and those madmen don't give cars right-of-way) then you turn to the right. Further up the country the cars stop and wait for the person to cross the road even if they haven't quite made it to the corner yet.

The result was that even as a pedestrian I had a lot of problems. I was hanging around at a crossing just waiting for the cars to drive past and they didn't come past me. Yes, they were still stopped there waiting for ME to cross.

Like I said, they're mad outside the South. Certainly both as a driver and as a pedestrian I muttered to myself often enough "they're all mad".

As I wrote earlier I spent a couple of weeks halfway between here and Lapland and to do that and have a car around, I had to drive.

On the way there I started noticing odd things after maybe a couple of hundred miles.

There were two-number (and thus wide and in fairly good condition) roads in the middle of nowhere and often going it seemed from one extremely unimportant (and SMALL) town to another maybe 60 or 70 miles away. Drive across one of these roads and within it seemed 20 or 30 miles there was another of them.

I finally took one of them and it was as empty of traffic as I had imagined - I mean who actually in small, insignificant town X wants to drive 70 miles to small insignificant town Y (which - this is Finland - will have exactly the same shops and the same prices.

You'll perhaps be wondering how this situation came about. After all there are roads in Southern Finland that are in dire need of widening and have been for years.

The answer is Politics. As I wrote before the Center Party is the party of the rest of Finland. Go virtually anywhere outside the far south of Finland and the local voting areas are dominated by the Center Party (apart from a couple of larger towns - SDP - and some areas on the West Coast (Swedish Peoples Party)).

Add to that the fact the the Center Party has almost invariably been in every coalition government and you get a regular game played by the traffic ministry.

First they pick out say 5 roads that are needed to be improved (or built). Two of these will be in the south and three will be in the rest of the country. Invariably then there will not be enough money for all five and one will be dropped. That one will *always* be one of the two in the South.

In fact over the past maybe (I'm guessing, but it seems likely) 10 years that road is the road from Hanko to Helsinki which for most of its journey through Southern Finland is one lane in each way.

This road also happens to be the route taken by I think 60% of the car transporters taking new cars from the port in Hanko to Russia. That's the reason it has always been on the list; it's a very busy and very dangerous road (although less dangerous than in the early days when both the Russian trucks were of very bad condition and the drivers drove (fast) in convoys because, presumably, they were afraid of Finnish peasants attacking them (which - in case you were not aware of this - is a laughable thought - for one thing it would be hard to find a peasant!)).

Anyway the point is that this road has always been on the list for widening and has always been turned down with priority given to a road somewhere in rural Finland with about 2 cars an hour (I'm exaggerating but not by that much).

Not only that but another road that was given priority was expanding the bypass that goes around the south and west of Tampere (a city of 150 thousand people so not exactly difficult to drive through and there WAS already a perfectly good and fairly wide ring road in place) to full motorway level.

I saw this on our way back when we decided as it was a Monday not to go through the centre as we had done on the way up. Really massive roadworks solely with the intention of allowing cars to join the existing road to do so without seeing a Stop sign. A mere fraction of the sums involved would have improved the Hanko road years ago.

No doubt that was also done in the name of regionalism.

So there you have it. Not for the first time the people in the South pay the bulk of the taxes but the benefits are spread throughout the country.

Not only that but the regional areas outside the south also get subsidy payments from the larger towns in the south that have better economies.

So if you live like me in Southern Finland and drive north, whenever you see a wide empty road or a modern, large library in a very small place, just be proud that there (and not in your own backyard) is where your tax payments are going.

(and whatever you do don't look at the two garaged detached houses with extensive gardens that cost a fraction of the semi-detached house with carport and a mere scrap of land that is all you can afford in the South.)

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.