Finns are close to nature while Brits are obsessed with the weather

This morning I finished another of my Helsinki airport buys. In her book, which I'd loosely translate as 'You Were Never With Me', Leena Lehtolainen weaves an intriguing story about a marriage slowly dissolving into complete non communication. The narration is largely confined to two sets of diaries by husband and wife.

When the wife realises the husband is reading her private journal, she starts to fake her entries. She makes her life appear happy and contented whereas it's all but. Eventually the husband disappears and everyone presumes he's drowned himself. (This book is set in Helsinki, the Capital of suicides).

While the tragedy of the marriage is seen through the intimate notes made by the couple, seasons change. The diary entries in the novel often start with a note about the progress of spring, the first snowfall in winter, or the fading light in the autumn. The characters spend great amount of time outdoors: they ski in the winter, jog in the woods when there's no snow and sail in the summer.

Finns use the woods and lakes and sea surrounding them as some kind of vast leisure park. Yet they suffer extreme weather, even in Helsinki you can have temperatures below -20 C in the winter and above +20 in the summer. And everything else in between.

I was left pondering how differently the Brits live. There are many more of us (you) per square metre, and the seasons aren't so changeable. And it rains a lot. I also thought in a similar British novel the diaries would note whether it was warm or cold, rainy or dry, windy or calm. In the Finnish novel the actual weather was hardly mentioned.

Funny old literary world.

Oh to be a Finnish Man

Apparently there's a rush on books from Finland. I was talking to Nick at the lovely Mr B's bookshop in Bath last week and he said one of their bestsellers is The Howling Miller by Arto Paasilinna. He was popular when I was growing up in Finland and some of his novels were turned into films (The Year of the Hare). To me he was a little old-fashioned, concerned mostly with the agonies of being a Finnish Man (there are many). This theme is well covered by modern Finnish literature.

When I was last in Helsinki I picked up Mika Nousiainen's Finnish bestseller which has not been translated into English yet (I don't think). It's a story of a man who loves Sweden so much that he exchanges his life with a Swedish man. Most Finns hate Sweden - to an Englishman this is the same as wanting to become a Scott (or an Irishman, Frenchman, Canadian, American...you get the gist). Nousiainen's book is a very astute exploration of the relationship between Finns and Swedes. Finland was under the rule of the Swedish kingdom two hundred years ago. During the Second World War Sweden was neutral (or cowards Finnish Man would say) while Finland fought with Russia. You can see how the Finns had a minority complex about Sweden.

But of course Nokia changed all that.

Most people I encounter in the UK are surprised to hear that a) Finnish is a completely different language from Swedish b) the two countries don't get along. I lived in Sweden as a teenager, and loved it there. My book Pappa's Girl deals with some of those memories. So to me it's interesting to read about this conflict between the two countries and how others perceive it. It's also incredibly funny, because we are so very different both temperamentally and culturally. This is particularly apparent in the way the men in the two countries behave. There's a quote from the book which I'd like to translate. 'Nobody wants to be a Finnish Man. Even a Finnish Woman only marries a Finnish Man if she's not pretty enough to marry a foreigner.'

Ouch!

Women as sex objects

Prof Susan Fiske, of Princeton University, has found that some men do not see scantily glad women as human. The part of the brain which usually becomes active during social interaction deactivated in some men when they looked at pictures of women in their bikinis. The men's brains treated the women as objects. Ms Fisk blames the constant bombardment of sexualised images of young women for this phenomen.

Did we not know this already?

I'm sure some women would give the same reaction when looking at calendars of firefighters with a strategically placed towel on their laps.

So sex just sex, why does it matter so much.

A recent survey amongst pensioners, and I'm now talking of the 70-80 year-old-bracket, found that the one thing they most regretted in life was not having enough sex. They wished they'd had more of it with more partners.

The base desire to copulate is a strong need. It was not until the Victorians came along that we started having morals. Sex makes us healthy, it keeps us looking young and is good for our minds. So what if some men see us a sex objects, surely it's what we want anyway?

If only life was so simple. It's easy to pretend not have emotions. It's easy not to see the rape statistics, the horrific reports on domestic violence, the increase in teenage pregnancies and STD's.

So what's the answer. Men see women as sex objects. Women do the same with men, sometimes. Not all of these people will go out at night and like vampires hunt down the opposite sex. Those who do would possibly have done so anyway, whether they've been bombarded with sexual images or not. Society is wonderful at making excuses for its ills. Especially when it's the media that's at fault. After all, how can you control the media.

I say let's blame the bankers. I'm sure they see everything in life as objects.