Lapped (Part 2)

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In the morning, we explored our holiday home, and the surrounding area. There were two bedrooms...and two bathrooms, one with a sauna. Unfortunately nothing in the second bathroom worked at all.





There was also a kettle - a metal kettle which you boiled by putting it on the stove. There were teabags - but only because we'd brought them with us from England. Eventually there was milk from a local market, so we sat drinking our tea trying to decipher the writing on the milk carton.

From hazy memory, Finnish milk contains "Kolhidrat" and "Zukker", which is pleasantly familiar, and is called "Lattomjoelke". "Latt" as in "Latte", and "Mjoelke" as in the East European "Mjlako" - so we were drinking "Milk-Milk". Unless "Latte" meaning "Milk" comes from a word meaning "Cow", in which case it's "Cow Milk".

Speculative linguistics - the holiday game for the educated family.





Breakfast in the restaurant was a buffet affair. One one side, a big tub of cornflakes, a big tub of alpen, a big jug of milk and an enormous tub of yogurt, all to be mixed to your taste.

I chose from the other side, which offered two kinds of cheese, two types of spiced ham, assorted breads, various butters and marmalades, sliced tomatoes, sliced cucumbers, sliced gherkins, sliced salmon...and three different kinds of pickled herring. I adopted a philosophy of 'one of everything', and settled down at the table of my brother's friends to get to know them.





There was Rob - one of those immensely clever people who feels absolutely no need to show it off, and who seemed impressed that I could spot his south German accent. Gareth - a young bespectacled nerd who can consume truly vast quantities of cake yet remain slim and toned thanks to constant mountain biking and running. And John, a big beardy bear with a big bellowing belly laugh.

As is traditional, the two women at the table barely spoke and I can't recall their names at all. Which means I either was too busy being shallow and fancying one of the boys or...erm. Well anyway.





I spent the second half of the morning exploring the campus with Rob. The roadsides are littered with bits of 'folk art', put there mainly I think to serve as reference points for guests who can't tell one track of packed snow bordered with snowy trees from another.

The centerpiece was a frozen lake (with bridge for those who don't feel like walking across) and...an actual igloo. Or "Ice Chapel", as it was called. A small church, roughly circular and maybe forty feet in diameter, decorated with relief sculpture on all sides.

There's no way this could be ordinary snow - it must have been compacted and mixed with something concrete-like, then transported to the site and assembled. There must be a thousand little tricks of the trade used in making these things for tourists. We'd return to the chapel later for the wedding.





There was a great deal of teadrinking on this holiday. The restaurant had more than a dozen varieties, and you could drink as much as you liked for free, just by filling a cup from the spout. Mornings, evenings and nights we spent boiling the kettle and pouring the result on teabags quietly taken from the restaurant, as punctuation between naps, reading, listening to audiobooks, going for walks and trying to get that dratted sauna to work.

We also drank it having agreed to wake up at five in the morning to look for the aurora borealis - as we'd been told that was when the cloud cover would lift. Well, it didn't, and we spent quite a long time staring as a vague green blur in the sky, waiting for it to turn into a laser show.

It wasn't just my family - half of the cabins had people outside, staring at the sky and waiting. It was not the Day of the Triffids.





Anyway, the wedding. Beforehand, I had absolutely no idea why my brother and his girlfriend wanted to get married. Now, having watched it happen, I still have no idea why they wanted to do it. But they do love each other and it makes them happy so...that's reason enough.

We got bussed to the chapel, and spent the minutes waiting for the happy couple photographing it mercilessly. Eight cameras, each with a wedding guest attached, snapping at any anything which doesn't move. We then arranged ourselves in the customary way (groom's people on the right, bride's on the left), and in they came. My brother Richard in a starchy grey suit from circa 1972, and his bride Debbie in a black ballgown and flowing white cape, with hair held up with a band and a green gemstone necklace.






I've been to exactly three weddings in my life. The one before this was between a bewildered former drug-addict who (I was told) needed someone to help him get his life back on track. The blushing bride was (I could see) a bully who just wanted someone malleable to control. The two families were seemingly not on speaking terms and I gave the marriage a year at the outside.

However, the thing I remember most clearly was the bizarre service, in which he priest told us that the sole purpose of marriage is "The continuation of the species". I mention it because for my brother's marriage, a minister had made the two hour journey to declare a different sole purpose in not-quite-grammatical English: "The continuation of the culture".

The couple exchanged vows, then rings, giggling and embarrassed, and managed an awkward kiss - before dissolving into a laughing hug as genuine as the last few minutes had been forced.





The moment of authenticity over, we guests were shepherded into a room where there was a table made of solid ice, and served chilled champagne as a prop for the official wedding photographer.

Outside there was a man in a harlequin-like costume, with a sled and two reindeers. Now, I thought reindeers were rather like horses with antlers, but no. These were like nervous little grey ponies - and one of them hadn't grown his antlers yet. There's something quite doglike about them - including the way they absolutely refuse to look at the camera.





Ten minutes later, the newlyweds were on the sled, being dragged off into the distance to begin their honeymoon. Actually the honeymoon starts in London, and will consist of pointing the car in a random direction and driving until they find somewhere interesting - for two weeks.

Back to our cabins for more tea, then a trip to the souvenir shop to buy something...furry, overpriced and memorable.





And on to the food, sat next to the one of the boys I fancied, and quite a lot of red wine. A good combination with lots of potential - potentially. For starters, grated reindeer in mayonnaise on a dense, half leavened bread. Then salmon cream soup with dill. Then the main course which in my case was elk steak - think of something with the mouthfeel of beef, and the taste of a rabbit that's eaten nothing but bacon - with baked potatoes and assorted vegetables in red Cognac gravy.

By now we were all feeling just a little too full - and drunk. I was sufficiently drunk to do my Kenneth Williams impersonation, my father was drunk enough to be even more of an opinionated pain than usual, and Debbie was far gone enough to tell her new father in law to just shut up.





Then there was pudding, with more wine. And then there was wedding cake. And then another slice. I was up for more but, well, there wasn't any more room inside and I didn't have the strength to stand up and get some.



Somehow we all got to our cabins - at least I assume we did because that's where I woke up.







There's a saying that the journey back is longer than the journey there. In this case it was just the same, but in reverse. I'd survived getting there by listening to Tom Baker reading "The Strange Case of Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde". On the way back it was Freema Agyeman reading something about Dr Who in the wild west.





When we got home, we celebrated with a fry up, and the chocolate bars from the restaurant.





So after all that, can I summarise it twitter-like? Went to Finland, saw a lot of snow, ate too much, watched my brother get married, met some cool people, still hate flying.

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