Finnish

God I am sad. The last time I remember being so sad to leave a holiday was when I was a teenager in Corsica and pulled one of the barmen who was approximately twice my age and, in retrospect, possibly a paedophile, but as I left for the airport I thought I might die of heartbreak. The only thing keeping me going was my dream of the day in September that I might receive a letter from him once I returned to boarding school. Oh the naive yet charming idiocy of my youth. The soundtrack to that week remains Eric Clapton’s Unplugged album, which may give an indication of a) how long ago this was and b) how desperately, desperately uncool I have been, consistently, since I was born.

So today was our last day. We awoke early and went out for a final cross-country ski, just the two of us, gliding through the furrows like old pros, following the verbal directions Pascal had given us until we got down onto the frozen river and took a wrong turn, taking a stunning track several kilometers through a birch forest before emerging, sweating hard and laughing in shock, at precisely the point we’d left well over an hour previously. Back, eventually, to the hotel for lunch, packing and our final sow-na, a ritual that we now struggled to fit into an hour and a quarter, so comfortable are we with the heat and freezing swim combo. I have been astonished by how quickly I’ve acclimatised – at the beginning of the week I couldn’t be outside without my glove for more than thirty seconds without genuinely panicking about frostbite, and now I’m wandering about like a local. I am destined to be annoying forever when someone says ‘Oooh, it’s cold’ – I’ll always be sure to tell them they haven’t known cold if they haven’t experienced minus 35.

After he’d helped me wrap my reindeer skin in a black bin bag and tape it up for transit, we said an emotional goodbye to Pascal and presented him with his leaving gift of beer and Euros. The week has been exceptional, unforgettable, superlative – but I think we were particularly lucky to have such a nice guy looking after us, a man who genuinely loves the landscape, who for the past three years has left his family and friends behind in rural Belgium and travelled here to work in the snow. He has a foreigner’s objective love of the country and was always full of facts, explaining how the line of the Arctic Circle is defined (something to do with having 12 continuous hours of daylight after 21 June each year, and 12 continuous hours of darkness in the winter), and gleefully informing us that seal bladders make the most effective anoraks as we squealed obediently like piglets in a vice. His English was also charmingly foreign, as he pulled over in the car and said "Now we make photo," or when he was describing his Belgian girlfriend's appearance and said she had "long black hairs." Not a selling point.

What else can I tell you?

• Apparently I’m wrong about the trash situation – I had thought that the terrain was totally unspoilt by human debris, but he told me that Finns are some of the worst litterers he’s experienced, throwing oil drums and anything else unwanted out of their cars as they drive. Clearly now it’s all buried under several feet of crisp, white snow but come June when it melts, I understand that the picture may be slightly less esque.
• I am still pleased (is that appallingly patronising?) with the lack of Westernisation that we saw at the tourist attractions. No ‘have your photo taken as your husky sled rounds this hair-raising corner – then we’ll print it on a mug!’ offers, or overpriced T-shirts or marked-up soft drinks. They did what they did and nothing more, and we loved it.
• To save on resources and effort, bus drivers deliver local post in Finland. There are large post receptacles at bus-driver-window height along the roads, where they will lean out and deposit the mail for nearby houses. The receptacles are open-fronted plastic boxes, meaning that all the packages and letters are sitting there, free for anyone to claim. But there is no theft. Except in the big cities, people don’t lock their doors except if they are going away for a long vacation.
• I didn’t see a single non-white person in the entire week. That was slightly uncomfortable.
• What else…? I cannot exaggerate the whiteness of the landscape. Everything, but everything, is white. The roads are covered in a thick layer of sparkling ice, and all cars are equipped with spiked tyres that drive along it as easily as we would on tarmac. There is no sludge. No piles of brown, polluted snow lying to the roadside. No salt or grit. Just white, white, white and cold, cold, cold; so cold you cough in surprise when it hits your lungs every morning. And so beautiful it brings a lump to my throat.
• Finland is very expensive. Beers and wine are around 5 Euros per glass, a crappy novelty fleece in a tourist store that should normally be about £20 is nearer £50. Food, while delicious, is not cheap either. Petrol is extortionate. But wages are good too, and services are great. Just the fact that, twice a day including Sundays, someone drives around all the many hundreds of miles of snowmobile and cross country tracks, smoothing out the routes for all the local exercisers, is… well, it’s a lovely thing. Our tax money goes for local gyms and park exercise circuits, I know – but there’s something so special about the snow. The whiteness and the space. London will be a shock. Thankfully I’m going to Ikea in Croydon tomorrow afternoon so the Nordic adventure will continue. A final, slightly teary hey hey from Finland. See you in Blighty.