The Beckhams in Finland

The biggest news item on TV and the various plasma screens in trams and the metro last Sunday in Finland was the arrival of Mr Beckham to Turku for an operation on his Achille's tendon. The retired Finnish surgeon, Sakari Orava, a world-leading expert in the field, seemed baffled by the media attention. 'I'm retired and don't really work much. But I happened to be free so I said yes when AC Milan contacted me,' he said. And added, 'I hope it goes well.'

A small and eager crowd of fans, mostly young girls, waited in the freezing cold Turku airport and were rewarded with a glimpse of Beckham's face, his expression revealing that he was in some considerable pain. Screaming teenagers was probably the last thing he needed right then.

On the following day, Monday, there was more: in the morning when Daughter and I got onto the tram on Bulevardi, the plasma screen showed the news that Lady Beckham too was arriving in Turku. 'Why Turku,' Daughter said, exasperated, 'why not Helsinki!'

It hadn't escaped my notice either that the events were taking place in one of my least favourite cities in Finland. There's a bit a national feud going on between Turku and my home town, Tampere. I'm not really sure why it is, it's just always been our ambition to beat Turku in anything: ice-hockey, babies birthrate, most number of R-kiosks. You get the idea.

But more than the old rivalry between the cities, I was much more intrigued by another question. What was Mrs Beckham going to wear on her feet? A brief drop in the temperature the previous week, followed by an immediate cold snap had made the pavements at least in Helsinki more suitable for ice-hockey then walking. I'd been negotiating the streets with difficulty for four days now, and I wore flat winter boots. Her ten inch heels would surely prove challenging?

What I hadn't realised that naturally she'd be driven straight to an underground entrance at the Mehiläinen hospital. From these pictures it seems clear she never even set foot outside on the icy pavements in the freezing temperatures.

What I wanted to know was where my private chauffeur had been all week?

Landlocked

I've always had a thing about islands. I was born in Tampere, an industrial city pegged between two of the 190,000 lakes in Finland, Näsijärvi and Pyhäjärvi. When my family moved to Stockholm, we didn't get very far from water. The capital of Sweden is made up of beautiful islands. But as a Finn I would argue the archipelago surrounding Turku on the Finnish side of the Baltic is much more stunning. It's where the fiercely independent, Swedish speaking Åland Islands are situated. Though closer to Stockholm than Turku, they still loosely belong to Finland.

About twenty years ago my mother settled there and we have since been going back every summer and sometimes in between. Life in Åland - or The Island as we call it - feels slightly old-fashioned. It's as if floating in the middle of the Baltic allows you not to worry about the stresses and strains of modern living. There are cars, mobile phones, supermarkets, offices, but for some reason it's as if it all happens in slow motion. Unlike the Finns in Helsinki or the Swedes in Stockholm, the Ålänningar prefer to observe rather than part take. Perhaps it's because the Island is full of tourists from the neighbouring countries, doubling its scarce population during the months of June and July. Or perhaps it's because most of these tourists arrive by boat, either on the many commercial ferries or small private sailing boats.

As the children have grown, they've started to make their own trips to the Island. This year daughter went on her own, last year son did the same. My mother keeps asking when we're coming over. It is our dream to have our own place there on a clifftop in a low built house with vast windows over looking the sea.

This is the view from the sauna cottage, our occasional sleeping quarters, at about 2 in the morning on a summer's night when the sun dips behind the horizon for a few minutes before coming up again.

This picture more than any others I've taken over the years begs the question: How on earth did I end up landlocked in Wiltshire?