Rein 'em in. Seriously.

What's brilliant about this holiday is that it's not only amazing in every conceivable way, but I'm also learning, which alleviates most of the normal I'm-on-holiday-and-achieving-nothing-and-even-though-that's-the-point-of-holidays-I-still-feel-guilty guilt. Here, in bullet form, are some of the nuggets we learned yesterday about huskies:

• Huskies eat dried nuggets of raw salmon and meat
• They start racing aged one and normally retire around ten years old
• The intelligent women go first in the racing pack, with the stronger men behind
• They can run happily up to 25 km a day but race even further
• The ears of the puppies are very soft

And today, we went to a reindeer farm. This was brilliant for many hundreds of reasons, but here are the educational highlights:

• Each reindeer-owning family has its own recognisable series of nicks that it cuts into the ears of each of their reindeer in order to identify them. These nicks are recorded in a detailed local book for everyone's reference.
• The fluffy slivers of skin that are removed from the ears during the nicking process are saved and threaded into curious mobiles for interior decoration. Why waste?
  
• When the babies are born, it's hard to tell whose mummy owns which baby, so instead of putting the nicks in the ear, they put a leather necklace with a carved wooden medallion around the neck of the baby to identify it tentatively. After a year, they come back and make sure they've identified the right baby, and if all the families are in agreement, they put the nicks in the ear to mark it as theirs.
• The reindeer people make shoes out of reindeer fur. The fur at the front of the sole lies facing the centre of the foot, and the fur at the back lies the other way, creating a gripping surface. It's really clever.
• The shoes hook up at the toe end so that straps can be passed around the front and attached to cross-country skis.
• There are two breeds of reindeer - mountain and forest. The former have really short legs. We didn't see any of those. The forest reindeer are more common in Lapland.
• The farm we visited wants to make its livelihood from growing reindeer feed, which it makes in the summer. This does not create enough income, however, so in the winter months they make more money by hosting tourist parties like ours. They also sell the reindeer to third parties to be killed for their meat and skins. They make 5.40 Euros per kg of live reindeer, but once dead the meat is sold for around 20 Euros a kg and the skins fetch around 50-70 Euros each. I asked why they don't kill the reindeer on site and sell them off if it's more valuable that way, but apparently the EU regs are so strict that it's not worth the effort.
• Each town in Lapland has a slightly different local costume. The styles are all similar but the colours and trims vary. The men wear a hat with four corners, each representing one of the four winds (N, S, E, W). The hats have tassels down one side. If you wear your tassels on the right, it means you're married - on the left and you're single and looking. Women's hats do not indicate their marital status. Brilliant.

After our gripping and edifying lecture, we went out and met our reindeer. We were in convoys of four sleds, with a reindeer separating each of us. We were in the front convoy. So it goes: reindeer, sled, reindeer, sled, reindeer, sled (containing us), reindeer, last sled. They are all tied together and each reindeer pulls the sled behind it with sticks attached to a girth round their middles. We set off. Just like the first few seconds with the huskies yesterday, it was hectic. The reindeer are going full pelt through deep sled-width tracks in the snow. Our sleds are low, and we're lying down in them with a blanket over us, fairly helpless. It's like being in a bobsled. Suddenly, we notice a reindeer running alongside us to the left. This should not be happening. It is the reindeer from the sled behind. He is trying to overtake. This will not be successful but we're going at quite a lick and it's not clear how it will play out. Then Grania yelps. We turn to our right. The front reindeer from the second convoy has barged past the back of our group and is making a bid for freedom. He has prodded Grania in the back of her head with his not-inconsiderable antlers. The face of the Lappish woman driving the runaway reindeer is one of abject terror. We realise the situation is not ideal but dissolve into uncontrollable giggles and shimmy down in our sled, paralysed. After thirty seconds, we recover and turn around to see what has emerged. The Lappish woman has driven her convoy into a snow drift in an emergency effort to control her fleet. Then we turn further and, with horror and hysteria, realise that there is no longer anyone in the sled behind us. The two Germans and their blankets have been deposited somewhere en route. We are incapacitated with laughter. It is now eleven hours later and I am still basically helpless with hysteria. The sight of the unexpectedly vacated sled, which had previously held a bemulletted woman, her absurdly high-tech Canon SLR and her clearly gay husband, was too much for us to bear.

When we arrived at our lunch venue and approached the lady who had been upturned, she was determined to make it seem like nothing remotely unusual had happened, saying 'Bof, it was nothing,' or the Deutsche equivalent, which made the whole thing even funnier. Then we fed lychen to our reindeer, which is apparently their special treat, and were taught how to lasso antlers. I was unexpectedly brilliant at this and was the only member of our group who managed to throw the loop over both the left and right protuberance. Unfortunately these antlers were not attached to a reindeer but were sitting, static, in the snow. When we were then ushered into a pen with two sprinting deer, we weren't quite so successful. Then a lunch of reindeer burgers in a hut, back to base, a tour of Levi, the local ski resort, and returning to the hotel for saunas, snoozing and a delicious dinner. Now: a screening of When Harry Met Sally. Hey hey.