Happy Good Friday?

Today is Easter Monday, the end of our four-day Easter holiday. Normally, a four-day holiday on the cusp of vaguely spring-like weather is a Godsend for most Finnish families, often a good opportunity to get out of town for a while or even an end-of-season ski trip to Lapland. Of course, this year in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, it's different, with all restaurants, bars, theaters, swimming halls, sports events, churches, you name it, closed and deserted, and even the possibility of non-essential travel outside the Uusimaa province where Helsinki is located forbidden by law.  There was no trick-or-treating this year. It hardly felt like Easter.

After I moved to Finland many years ago and was adjusting to the social norms here, one thing I learned was the proper way to give Easter greetings. With a lot of holidays here, you use the word “hauska” (which means “fun”). You say “Hauskaa joulua!” (Merry Christmas), “Hauskaa vappua!” (Happy May Day), and “Hauskaa juhannusta!” (Happy Midsummer). So, it seemed natural to me that you would say “Hauskaa pääsiäistä!”, (Happy Easter). After all, in the States we say “Happy Easter”. Seems normal.However, I was quickly corrected that the proper usage is “Hyvää pääsiäistä!” (literally, Good Easter).

The reason was, of course, that Easter is supposed to be a solemn holiday, not a fun one (remember “hauska” means “fun”). In English, "Happy Easter" does seems to work, since the Easter story ends with Jesus rising from the tomb, a happy ending. To think of it as a “fun” happy-go-lucky ending is perhaps to diminish the gravity of the event.

Good Friday is another matter, however. Most Christians probably don’t think of the execution of Jesus as a “happy” event -- well, maybe no one except Donald Trump. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say, “Happy Good Friday”. Even though the execution was necessary for the rising, I think most Christians think of it as a sorrowful event. (I haven’t gone to church in decades, so maybe I’m wrong about that.)

Of course, now that Trump has set the example by tweeting that exact greeting, I’m sure it will be quickly adopted by all his followers. Next year, no doubt, MAGA folks will be sending out “Happy Good Friday” cards.

Wide Open Shopping

The first year I attended the University of Georgia, in Athens, I lived in an apartment complex called Callaway Gardens near a busy four-lane highway lined with fast food joints and other roadside businesses. To me, this was city living. With some 50,000 inhabitants at the time, Athens was the biggest town I had ever lived it – and with the exception of Helsinki, it still is.

On the other side of the highway from my apartment, at the bottom of a hill, was a Kroger supermarket. It was the closest big grocery store and was open 24 hours a day. I recall once going there with my roommates at 3 o’clock in the morning to do our food shopping because...well, I’m not sure why. Maybe it was just because we could. Maybe we were pulling an all-nighter. Who knows? As you might expect, the place was practically deserted. No waiting at the checkout lanes.

Anyway, I was thus introduced to the convenience of 3 a.m. shopping, something that Athenians had perhaps been enjoying for years. That was in 1976.

It was very different when I moved to Helsinki a few years later. Like many European nations, Finland had always imposed strict limits on when stores could open their doors, the result of the combined influence of the national churches and the labor unions. I’m not quite sure why the clergy and unions should object so strongly to Sunday shopping, since almost no one goes to church anyway and retail workers get paid extra if they work outside regular weekday hours.

In any case, when I came here in the 80s, Sunday opening was still strictly verboten, except for service stations and kiosks. Other days of the week, stores were allowed do business only beginning at eight in the morning and had to close by eight in the evening (or six on Saturdays).

Opening hours were gradually expanded in the 1990s by two hours to between seven and nine (but still only to six on Saturdays). Even then, no shopping on the Sabbath for the Finns.

It feels like only yesterday (okay, it was in fact in 2000) that larger stores were finally allowed to open on most Sundays (between noon and six), much to the relief of hordes of working parents. Suddenly, we didn’t have to squeeze our major weekly shopping into Saturdays. Oh, the luxury of being able to push an overflowing cart of groceries around a big box store until 6 o’clock on a Sunday!

That’s the way it has stayed for most of this century, with some additional gradual loosening of opening hours in recent years for smaller stores (under 400 square meters in size) and even for bigger ones on certain religious holidays, mainly Epiphany (loppiainen, in Finnish), when stores have the chance to harvest extra business from Russian tourists making Christmas holiday visits from across the border.

(January 6^th, which in Finland is Epiphany, the day the Magi brought presents to Baby Jesus, is celebrated as Christmas Eve in Russia, due to the Russian Orthodox Church clinging to the old calendar created under Julius Caesar. No fancy 16^th-century tinkering around with the calendar by Pope Gregory for them!)

Even with expanded opening times, some other public holidays have remained sacred. An American tourist making a port call from a cruise ship this summer was interviewed on a Helsinki street by a TV reporter. He complained bitterly how on his one and only day in the Finnish capital absolutely no shops were open. It was Juhannus, Midsummer’s Day, a day of relaxing and partying in the countryside. Who would want to shop then anyway?

As of six days ago, however, the gates of the Finnish shopping world have been thrown wide open. A new law removes absolutely any restrictions on opening hours, leaving it entirely up to any retail businesses to decide how to arrange its business hours, even allowing them to open on any public holidays. It’s up to the store to decide if staying open late or on holidays justifies the higher salaries that employees get for those hours.

It’s a huge change for Finland, and probably quite unusual in Europe. For example, the EU capital Brussels still closes shut at six, eight at the latest.

Our local suburban grocery is open today, though not for the first time on Epiphany. Thanks to the new law, it will soon introduce new hours, staying open until ten, even on Saturdays and Sundays.

Will I ever be able to walk over there at 3 a.m. to load up on fish sticks, cheese and potatoes? For that store, as for most others in Helsinki, I doubt operating around the clock would ever make economic sense. And anyway I doubt I’d want to shop again in the dead of night. 

But you never know. 

Finns bustling at the Sello shopping mall near Helsinki. Photo by Skorpion87.

Hey, Hei, Heinä!

Near my home in North Helsinki is what I usually refer to as “the horse farm”. That’s not a completely correct description of Tuomarinkylän kartano, but it will do. They do have horses.

Tuomarinkylä (“the judge’s village”) is, in fact, a former kartano (“estate”) that was founded almost 300 years ago on the broad, rich bottomlands of the Vantaa River. It was a Finnish equivalent to the Georgia plantation or Russian usadboy, though of course with the arduous farm work being done by sharecroppers, not slaves or serfs.

The manor house at Tuomrinkylä.

Today, Tuomarinkylä is owned and run by the city. Its well-preserved manor buildings  contain a cafe and an interior decorating shop (and formerly a couple of museums, now closed due to austerity cuts). Its barns and stables are home to dozens of horses belonging to a couple of riding schools operating there. Its fields are sown in grain and hay. It’s a nice place to visit to be sure.

Driving past there recently, I noticed a sign saying something about an upcoming heinä-something-or-other. I should have taken a closer look. Seems that for quite some time I’ve been missing an unexpected side of the farm.

The past couple of summers or so, I have noticed a field along the road running past Tuomarinkylä has been filled with rows and rows of haystacks, the old-fashioned kind formed around a wooden pole.

As a child, I remember seeing these kinds of traditional haystacks near my hometown in Georgia, presumably because that’s how one local farmer still did it in the 1960s, though by then the de rigueur method of gathering and storing hay had long been mechanized bailing.

I have also seen such hay stacks here and there in the Finnish countryside, though it’s not clear whether they were erected simply for decoration or out of nostalgia. Come to think of it, the place where I have regularly seen them was the small corner of a field cut off from the rest of the farm by a highway. Maybe the farmer figured it wasn’t worth getting a machine in there, and just did it by hand. Respect for that.

In any case, the time when hay was stacked by hand in Finland probably isn’t that far removed from today. Hiking in the woods with my wife a couple weeks ago, we happened to pass a farm where we saw leaning against a barn wall a dozen or so wooden poles, each sharpened to a point at the ends and with holes drilled through them at regular intervals. It was obvious what they were for.

Riding training at Tuomarinkylä.

For the record, nowadays hay in Finland is packed into in the huge, round bales also common in the States. The ones completely covered in white plastic and often left in the fields are whimsically called dinosauruksen munat ("dinosaur eggs").

It may not be going too far to say that haymaking is one those mundane things that underpin civilization – at least any civilization with livestock. And it’s been romanticized in plenty of artwork over the centuries, as well as lives on in such English expressions as, “needle in a haystack”, “hit the hay”, “make hay while the sun shines”, and the ever-popular “roll in the hay (!)”.

All through my childhood, my family always owned some cattle, though my parents were mainly running a small business in town. When I was in high school, we had maybe twenty head or so, which we kept on some pastureland we rented along with one of my uncles. Each summer, we’d close off one part of the pasture from grazing, allowing the grass to grow freely to its full height without fear of being munched by some ambling bovine. When the grass was high enough (and a long-enough stretch of hot, dry weather was forecast to allow harvesting), we’d hire someone to cut and bale the hay.

When the hay was dry enough for bailing, my brother and I were recruited to help load the bales onto the back of our pick-up truck, often driven by my mother, as we followed behind the hay bailer. The machine, pulled by a tractor, spat out the rectangular blocks of hay remarkably fast. We had to work quickly, slinging the 50-pound bales up onto the truck and stacking them five or six layers high, before hauling them to a barn to be unloaded and stacked there for the winter.

We once had to cut short a hiking trip in the Smokies because a window of hot, dry weather had opened up, and we were needed back home to bring in the hay. It was hot work, and I remember we couldn’t wait to finish so we could jump in the cold creek flowing past the field to cool off.

Crossroads at the farm.

As I recall, we cut hay in June back then in Georgia, in fact in early June. In Finland, it seems it’s traditionally done a month later in July, based on, if nothing else, the Finnish word for “July”.

In Finnish, the month of July is called heinäkuu, literally “hay month”, so that must be the month when you do something with hay. Obviously. I guess that goes to show the role that hay has played in ancient Finnish life, as opposed to, say, the corrupting influence of the Romans. (The English “July” is named after Julius Caesar, who without a doubt never spent a single day cutting hay.)

It’s almost surprising that the word for “hay” in Finnish (heinä, pronounced “hay-nah”) is so close to the English, given how weirdly different most Finnish words are. Obviously, it’s been borrowed from one of English’s Germanic-language cousins. I’m guessing Swedish, in which the word is “hö” (pronounced something like “heww”).

(Also a bit surprisingly, an informal Finnish word for “hello”, “hei” is identical in sound to the “hey” used in America. In this case, it definitely comes from the Swedish “hej”.)

Another way of translating heinäkuu (and my preferred way), is “hay moon”, since kuu means both “month” and “moon”. The connection there is, well, obvious. It reminds me of the names that Native Americans gave to their “moons”. For example, the Cherokee called July “Ripe Corn Moon”.

The fact that Finnish often has such descriptive names for different “moons” of the year adds to the sense I often have of the aboriginal character of the nature-loving Finns, though sometimes those descriptive names miss the mark. The Finnish word for June is kesäkuu, which can be read as “summer moon”, a twisted joke this year when June was the least summer-like it has been for years, depressingly cool, cloudy and rainy.

Haystacks under cloudy skies.

July hasn’t been much better, though the weather improved enough to put up hay at Tuomarinkylä, with a little help from the villagers. The sign I had seen by the road was for an upcoming heinätalkoot, which was held on July 2nd. Apparently, these events have been held for years, maybe even decades, but I’d never noticed. My only plausible excuse is that in the past I often spent that part of July out of the country. The more realistic excuse is that I just wasn’t paying attention. In any case, the heinätalkoot seems like a great idea.

Talkoot are probably best described as “communal work”, where a group of people pitches in to get some chore done. In the past, this included putting up buildings, in the same vein as the legendary "barn raisings" of the Amish. The most common form nowadays is when all the residents of a housing co-op periodically get together to fix/clean up the premises, mow the grass, trim bushes, clean gutters, that sort of stuff. Strangely enough, these kinds of group work could be called "bees" in America.

The heinätalkoot at Tuomarinkylä, one of those creative public happenings arranged regularly around Helsinki, gives city folks a chance to tap their country roots by pitching hay for a few hours like their ancestors used to do. From the photos, it looks like it would have been a fun outing. At least fun to watch. Hopefully, I’ll remember it next year, and try my hand at tapping my own haymaking roots, such as they are. 

Pekka Halonen's "The Hay Cutters".

Fast Food Finland

One part of my life in Finland that would certainly have been different if I had not left the US is my eating habits, especially when it comes to fast food.

We don’t eat a lot of fast food here, not compared to Americans, at least not in my family. Even when our kids were small we avoided going to McDonald's more than once or so a month, if even that. Nowadays, the most I’ll consume any kind of burger-and-fries “combo meal” in Finland is maybe two or three times a year.

I’m not saying that’s typical for Finns. Or that no fast food exists here. It does, but it’s nothing like the take-out cornucopia of North America.

In Finland, you won’t find the junk-food strips so typical of American cities, those long stretches of urban landscape lined with dozens of different franchises, where you can cruise along until you find the hamburger or taco or fried chicken or pizza or whatever quickly prepared meal your heart, or stomach, might desire. That culture doesn’t exist here.

If there’s something Americans do love, no, demand, it is choice and convenience. And nowhere does that seem truer than when eating is involved. Finns, and Europeans in general, haven’t been brought up with the same expectation of cheap and easy food, not until recently at least.

As late as the early 80s, American-style “fast” food was a still new experience for some Finnish folks, especially the older generation.

I remember when my in-laws went to a McDonald's for the first (and certainly the only) time. We were traveling back with them from Switzerland, where we had been visiting my sister-in-law Eeva-Riitta. In Lübeck, West Germany, we decided to make a quick stop for coffee at a McDonald's before catching the ferry back to Helsinki. Now, it’s not unusual for Finns to stop for coffee, not at all, especially on a longish drive. For my in-law’s generation, though, you stop for coffee, none of this driving and drinking from a travel mug, and you stop at a cafe, where they have real ceramic dishware, not paper cups and plastic spoons.

Drinking from paper cups might have been bad enough, but as we started to depart the McDonald's in Lübeck, I really took my mother-in-law by surprise when I rose from the table, took the food tray and dumped our empty cups into the trashcan. It was her first exposure to a “restaurant” where the customers are forced to clear their own tables.

Another example of fast-food culture shock occurred when I was briefly living again in Georgia. Eeva-Riitta had come over for a visit from Switzerland, and we were taking her on a trip to New Orleans. As we started out in the morning on the long drive from Athens to Louisiana, we stopped at a McDonald's for coffee and, probably for me anyway, some Egg McMuffins.

For Eeva-Riitta, who was something of a gourmet, maybe what we’d call a foodie nowadays, it was probably distasteful enough to be stopping for breakfast at a hamburger place. After all, it hadn’t been many years earlier that the first American hamburger joint in Winterthur, where she lived, had been bombed soon after opening, much to general approval of some residents.

But what really shocked her was that we didn’t even get out of the car and had our food handed to us through a window. She’d never realized such a thing as Drive Thru existed. Luckily, the food served in the restaurants we later visited in the Big Easy did meet with her approval, so maybe that made up for the indignity of Drive Thru.

Anyway, like I say, fast food is not unknown in Finland, and I’m not talking about the time-honored tradition of the “nakkikioski”, those steamy sidewalk booths selling water-soaked hot dogs and otherwise greasy fare to the somber folks pausing on a winter’s night on their journey between last call and the last bus home. And I’m not talking about the kebab places that are everywhere. I’m talking about American-style fast food, mainly McDonald’s.

McDonald’s arrived in Finland just two years after I did, opening its first restaurant here in 1984. Now, there are some 80 throughout the country, so the chain seems popular enough with Finns.

But before there was McDonald’s, there was Carrol’s. This American chain that I’d never heard of established itself in Finland in the mid-70s. I didn’t even realize it was originally American; I always assumed it was a purely Finnish imitation. In the early days, I would drop into one now and then and order a “Big Carolina” burger and ranskalaiset (French fries). It made me think of home. Kind of.

Finland does have its own, completely Finnish, hamburger chain, Hesburger. The founder of the chain was even invited to this year’s Independence Day gala at the Presidential Palace. I used to think that Hesburger evolved from the Snacky grilli, another Finnish chain of little fast-food places not much bigger than nakkikioskit. But apparently I’m wrong about that.

I have been to a Hesburger, but I can’t remember when. Sometime long ago. I have heard that they are considered to be better than McDonald’s. Maybe more suited to the local taste. At least, numerically, Hesburger is more successful locally. There are almost 260 stores in Finland, plus outlets in the Baltics, Germany and Russia, even as far afield as Kamchatka in the Russian Far East (only 950 kilometers from US territory!).

Still, nothing matches the worldwide reach of McDonald’s. We have ordered Happy Meals in various countries, ranging from Hungary to Indonesia to New Zealand. The snob in me hates to admit visiting exotic lands, with their own distinctive, mouthwatering cuisine...and then stepping into the familiar, plastic environs of a McDonald’s to order a Big Mac.

The thing is, when you’re traveling to those exotic lands with small kids, you often can’t avoid being drawn into these outposts of American fast food. The hold that McDonald's has on children is simply amazing, a genius of marketing really. Our kids were no less susceptible to the magic of McDonald's (maybe because we normally deprived them of fast food at home), so sometimes we had to give in. And to be fair, often it is obviously the easiest option.

When on a road trip with the kids in the backseat, we had to be careful not to tip our hands if we were even considering stopping at a McDonald’s. Discussing the different places to eat, my wife and I would not dare to actually say the word “McDonald's” aloud, lest we get the kids’ hopes up.

Instead, we took a cue from the world of the theater, where long-held superstition dictates that it’s bad luck to utter the actual name of Shakespeare’s tragedy “Macbeth”. In the same way, whenever we were considering stopping at McDonald’s for lunch, my wife and I would talk mysteriously about “the Scottish restaurant”. As far as I know, the kids never suspected that we weren’t in fact thinking of stopping for some haggis.

Other than McDonald’s, American fast-food franchises have been slow to set up shop in Finland. Subway came here some fifteen years ago. Pizza Hut has been here almost twice as long, but still has only six outlets in the entire country, or so I understand.

Starbucks finally arrived a couple of years ago, entering what is presumably the last civilized country on Earth that did not have even one Starbucks.

That’s about it. No Wendy’s. No KFC. No Domino’s Pizza. No Dunkin’ Donuts. No Taco Bell – which is a shame, since even my wife, no fan of fast food by any means, actually likes Taco Bell. (For the record, she doesn’t mind certain items on the McDonald’s menu either, just not the burgers.) And no Burger King – until recently, that is.

Burger King did open a store here late in 1982. I recall that it was located near the railway station in Kaisaniemi, but I’m not sure if I ever went there. It didn’t last long, maybe a year, maybe more, but not much. That was too bad, since I’ve always preferred BK to McDs, though my wife claims she sees no difference whatsoever between a Whopper and a Quarter Pounder.

A bit more than a year ago, however, Burger King finally returned to Finland, opening a small store on Mannerheimintie, in the location of an old photo shop that I still remember visiting (the bronze door handles still bear the word “Fuji”). Apparently, there were long lines outside waiting to get in, even more than week after it opened. Maybe there really is demand here for a bigger variety of hamburgers.

More Burger King stores have now since opened, and when I finally did step into one for a bite a couple of months ago, it was surely the classiest burger joint I’ve been to in Helsinki, maybe the world.

This Burger King occupies a cavernous room in Helsinki’s historic päärautatieasema, voted by the BBC in 2013 as one of the world’s ten most beautiful railway stations. The room was previously a restaurant and, like the rest of the 100-year-old station, was designed by the Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen, before he moved to the United States to work and teach. (His son would go on to design the Gateway Arch in St. Louis.)

Burger King has naturally left the room’s tall windows and Art Nouveau vaulted ceiling untouched. The National Board of Antiquities wouldn’t have it any other way. And at one end, on the wall high above the counters where customer now order pikaruokaa (fast food), is a beautiful fresco of a Finnish landscape completed in 1911 by Eero Järnefelt, one of the county’s best-loved painters.

Not bad. Compared to the places where I’ve usually had myself a quick meal of grilled meat and deep-fried potatoes, not bad at all.

The Art Nouveau ticket office of the Helsinki railway station.
A matching room now houses a spanking new Burger King.
Photo credit: JIP

 

Lost and Found

Last Saturday, I went for a walk with my wife to get a little exercise. On the way out the door, I grabbed a pair of wool socks in case the ones I was wearing weren’t thick enough for my slightly oversized rubber boots.

I crammed the socks into my jacket pockets along with a pair of heavy gloves, which of course it turned out to be completely unnecessary, as Saturday was another one of unseasonably warm (above-freezing) days that felt more like April than February.

All during the walk, the wool socks kept protruding from my overstuffed pockets, and I kept pushing them back in, so it was no surprise that when we returned from our hour out in the fresh air, one of the socks was missing.

Since I hate to lose stuff, and since I knew exactly where we had walked, I set out the next morning by bicycle to search for the missing hosiery.

Left behind.

I retraced the route with a clear search image of the sock in my mind. I knew that it wasn’t enough to scan just the surface of the sidewalks, dirt paths, and roadsides where the sock would have fallen after worming its way out of my pocket. I also had to keep an eye on fences, signposts, tree branches, mailboxes, in fact, any structure rising above the ground on which some passerby might have deposited my sad, lost sock.

This is such a typical occurrence in Finland that I doubt anyone would hardly ever think about it. As I rode past the horse farm near our home, then across the bridge over the Vantaa river into the subdivisions on the other side, I spotted – in quick succession – a red beret on a fence post, a mitten hanging in a birch tree, and a glove inserted into a wire fence at a construction site, all conspicuously visible in case, like me, their owners came looking for them.

I wonder how common this practice might be in other countries. For example, I have no idea whether Americans routinely rescue strangers’ outer garments and place them where they can easily be found. 

From one personal experience, however, I do know it does happen at least with sunglasses. A few years ago on the Fourth of July my wife, daughter and I were hiking with my sister in the Adirondacks Mountains of New York. Returning down a mountain trail, we took a break at a lakeside spot where a rough jeep road gave access to a crude boat ramp. My sister noticed a pair of sunglasses sitting on a log off to the side of the trail, and decided to put them on a large rock where the owner might better spot them.

Just as we started to head on down the jeep road to where our car was parked some two miles away, a battered pickup truck pulled up with a fishing boat in the back. Some time later, about halfway down the deserted road we began to think we heard sounds coming from behind us, like people shouting to each other. They seem to be getting louder, but we didn’t imagine it had anything to do with us. Then suddenly we could hear the sound of someone running hard, rapidly approaching us, between shouts of “hey”. We turned to see a young man coming around a bend in the road, out of breath. In his hand, the sunglasses. He and his father had noticed them after we left and assumed they belong to us, and this poor guy had just run a mile to return them to us. We hated to break the news to him that the glasses weren’t ours.

Going the extra mile to return a nice pair of sunglasses is one thing; whether Americans habitually rescue misplaced gloves, is another. I can’t say. When I lived in the States it wasn’t in cities where people take walks (if such American cities exist), and anyway it was in the South where the need for gloves, scarves, even warm hats is so small that these must only rarely get misplaced. They aren’t an essential part of your wardrobe as they are in Finland.

In fact, as a schoolboy I don’t recall ever wearing gloves waiting for the bus on those mornings when we had frost on the ground. I simply put my hands in the pockets of my jeans. (Doing things outdoors like hunting was different – then we used gloves.)

At my father’s service station, we used to sell brown, cotton gloves, mostly to the same customer who stopped in every morning before daybreak on his way to work at the chicken plant or some other workplace where he needed to protect his hands from the elements. At twenty-five cents a pair, they were cheap, which was handy since the customer seemed to go through a pair almost every day.

People in Finland don't go through that many gloves maybe, but still quite a few, judging by the number of lost ones that ends up on some fence or else in a lost and found box.

A yearly ritual for us at my kids’ school was going through the detritus of lost and found items before school let out for the summer. After the year-end school program, the singing of “Suvivirsi” (Summer Hymn), and the handing out of classroom certificates, we would go to the gym to check out the three or four large cardboard boxes full of all the gloves, scarves, socks, shoes, sweatshirts, jackets, even hockey helmets that had been mislaid in the school during the past winter. It always amazed me how much unclaimed stuff one small student body could lose track of. You would think even the most absent-minded ten-year-old would notice that somehow he had arrived home without his best winter parka.

More valuable lost items often end up at the local police station's lost and found center, thanks largely to general Finnish conscientiousness and honesty. Recently Reader’s Digest did an experiment where 12 wallets, containing some cash, were purposely “lost” in 16 cities to see how many would be returned to their “owners”. In Helsinki, 11 of the 12 wallets were returned, making the Finnish capital the most honest of the cities tempted by the easy pickings.

Once in London, on my way to a meeting, I stepped into a taxi to find on the seat an iPod. I wasn’t quite sure what to do about it. In Finland, I would have given it to the taxi driver, pretty certain that it would have found its way to the police station where it could possibly be returned to its owner. With London cabbies, I wasn’t so sure. (In the Reader’s Digest test, by the way, only five of the wallets “lost” in London were ever seen again.)

I called my British colleague to ask what the standard practice is in such matters, but she couldn’t really advise me. In the end, I gave it to the cabbie, figuring that even if he chose not to try reunite the iPod with its owner, it was anyway no less mine to keep as my own.

Unlike my sock, that is, which after about 40 minutes of cycling, I did finally find lying all balled up on the edge of the bridge over the Keravanjoki. Luckily, it hadn’t fallen to the frozen river below. It’s a nice sock, but certainly not worth venturing out on dodgy late-winter ice just to return it to its mate.