Ronda: Southern Spain......Photographs

Helsinki: words and pictures



Helsinki in the summer feels almost like Barcelona. Running away from the waterfront is a delightful narrow strip park. Within it the Finns disport themselves in the sunshine. Opposite a beautiful antique coffee house a band stand plays host to all manner of music making and further along the park you can hear music students plying their potential trade. As Vivaldi is to Venice; so Sibelius is to Finland and here I have twice come across a violinist playing the Sibelius violin concerto; ambition and talent combining in each instance. The atmosphere is quite like La Rambla, but with only marginal chances of being pick pocketed.

Finland has a long established culture but is in a sense a young country. It has no royal family and evinces total fascination in the doings of the royalty of its erstwhile invaders Sweden. The royal wedding there last year provoked wall to wall media coverage and endless TV repeats of the wedding all over Finland.

Part of its deliberately 'created' identity, which dates back to the start of the 19th century, is its architecture. Here is a kind of spin on Art Deco with Folk edges. Although an invented style, it has produced pleasing and engaging architecture with a human face, often literally. Although not part of Scandinavia, Finland is Nordic, it has a love of nature and its most famous mythic literature, the Kullervo, parallels the Viking sagas of the further Western countries feeding strongly through into this created architectural style.

My wife and I have spent several holidays here and on one occasion went into a corner shop and got chatting to the black Frenchman who was running it. He expressed that the Finns were totally different in Winter from the friendly, jolly people we see in the Summer. Introverted, depressed, inclined to being spiky and guarded. He felt the whole country was schoitzoid.

This past winter of 2010/11 has been an exceptionally cold and harsh one. Snow lying literally for months. A throwback to the time when the old folk were young. In the Winter, one resort for some is alcohol. There is an acknowledged problem in Finland with drink; the hard stuff is reserved for sale through the Government controlled Alko stores, usually an adjunct to the supermarkets. The price of drink is kept high. But for those in Helsinki, cheap drink is a cheap boat ride away. On the way over to Tallinn you are surrounded by duty-free and in that city the drink is sufficiently cheap to attract both Swedes and Finns who make the trip to stock up in a major way.

In the heat, it was fun to visit a Vodka Ice Bar. Enveloped in boots, robe with hood and mits, we enjoyed the novelty of sitting in ice chairs and drinking from glasses made of ice. It was refreshing, but the place was empty apart from visitors. No doubt the locals get more than their fill of sub zero when the visitors have, like the birds, flown away and the harbour ices over.

The first time I visited Helsinki I was being shown round by my Finnish friend. We were on a tram and suddenly he hauled me off it and frog marched me uphill into a square. He told me nothing but indicated that I was to go ahead into a big concrete bunker. I was a bit irritated, what was this about? We had been heading to the sea front for a walk around.

I went in and I don't think I have ever had more of a surprise. I was in a vast underground church, the Temppeliaukio (Rock) Church is built into a rock mound, the inside walls are mostly the exposed rock. The roof looks like a giant wok set into the building by long narrow pains of glass. It is stunning, I was silenced and filled with the emotion of stumbling, unprepared into one of the great buildings of the world.

By comparison, the cluttered interior decoration of the city's outpost Russian Orthodox church looks second rate.  But the Temppeliaukio is a wonderful space, full of light and warmed by the purple chairs and use of bronzed metallic panels. It has an atmosphere both welcoming and deeply serious. I was very recently in the Protestant Cathedral in Belfast, started around the turn of the 19th to 20th centuries. It was austere and cold in both temperature and in its complete absence of a spiritual presence; a vacuum, a husk of a building. This Helsinki building has a diametrically opposite atmosphere.

Another building worth a visit is the modern art gallery, the white inclines and ellipses provide a setting worth seeing in its own right. Generally the modern architecture is adventurous and misses the brutalist styles imposed elsewhere. They can enjoy and be proud of a lot of their new buildings. There is a quirkiness, playfulness and eccentricity within their nature which can pervade their outdoor spaces and the architecture.

The light really is somehow clearer and cleaner there. Sibelius captures the atmosphere of the country, the light and its landscape. A country that managed to give Communist Russia a bloody nose; for which they eventually paid by losing Karelia. It is still a grief to the older people who were brutally thrust out of their ancestral homeland. Sixty years later and they are not over it.

The people have a great affinity with their land, more so than most other peoples I have observed. So the exile is a physical and spritual loss to them. Many enjoy a heritage of folk songs, most of which are about nature, the land, the earth, the animals. Most are very poignant. An emotional and sometimes austere people. I was told they are hard to make friends with, but when you become a friend, it is to be taken into the family. I can attest to that latter and value those friendships enormously.



9/11

I wrote this piece about a week after the attack.

Out of a clear blue sky.

Life is linear, or rather; perhaps it flows like a turbulent river where sometimes we get caught in whirlpools, swirling powerlessly round until somehow we are ejected to continue the journey. Watching television reports this week of the destruction of the World Trade Centre was to endlessly replay the moments of impact from a growing number of vantage points. Collapse, stately and seeming silent, grief in all its guises. Even when no longer in front of the screen that silent film of destruction replayed itself across the mind's retina. A dark whirlpool.

I was to return in imagination over and over, stepping into the experiences of the survivors who provided such devastating soundbites. Phone calls broadcast from a plane hurtling towards the ground, forced to miss a cruelly chosen target. Death for them was as complete as if the target had been reached, but sacrifice in extremis pulled their best from them in their worst moment.

Those potent mobile calls, last declarations of love to mother, wife, son. Here preserved, a parting word that will become a kind of torture for the future. The voice preserved, the people disintegrated. Ten years away what does the new wife do about that particular ghost in the machine? Even erased from the tape the messages will grind themselves into the psyche.

The whole city, that whole country has been caught up in the whirlpools; well we all are even from afar. When will we be released? To an extent that ‘linear’ idea holds: travelling along through disbelief to shock, anger, from hope to despair. I sat in horror as the second tower collapsed in front of my eyes. It seemed to leave almost nothing behind it. Deceptively 100 floors somehow evaporated; a three story pile of dust with some metal sticking out. Quite quickly it got so much worse, scores of rescue vehicles had disappeared under rubble that signalled to us extra victims; the men who had arrived in them were buried and would not return to the fire, the police or ambulance stations. Details emerged that one of the hijacked planes had been the carrier and flight time and route we three had taken just a month ago: Boston to San Francisco, United Airlines. Was the feeling evoked empathy, or that vicarious desire for a connection? Whatever, it made me shake.

Down this black turbulent river flows a nation guided in their emotions by New York’s Mayor Guliani, connecting unerringly with his people, gentling them into a realisation of the scale of their loss, explaining as tactfully as anyone could the need for so many body bags; each part of a body, each limb would need its own bag. The President belatedly accessed emotions publicly and drew his people in. Clinton would have done it so much better, but he surely has to be relieved that he is now a bystander. Bush, schooled in at least some political skills, the awfulness whispered into his ear while he is sitting in front of class of kids in a school; the only immediate give-away his eyes widening.

There is such despair on the part of the waiting hospital staff. After 24 hours there was no one alive to find, to treat, no one being rescued. Even bodies seem to have been spirited away from the site. Somehow the Pentagon pictures had comparatively little impact. It looked like a substantial house where a large tree had collapsed onto it. But four days later, the most sophisticated and well equipped country in the world couldn’t find a way to subdue the fires.

That no doubt brutally peeled another layer of security off the Americans. For a space the churches are full again. Why do we push God into allowing these things, again providing a thirst for intimacy with him? Was He with all those people who struggled down endless flights of stairs never reaching the bottom? Some people thanked God they were late for work that day and were spared. Could he not have made a whole lot more people late? How about sparing the whole lot?

How many thousand dead is still in doubt. That word ’doubt’. To raise it in a context of faith is to suggest that so may loved people may have been consigned to oblivion. Instead we hope there is a finer place in which they are somehow safe. A tepid hope raised amongst the ruins of so many lives.

Patriotism has taken a hold in the US. I believe a war is in preparation. But against exactly who? Someone will be made to pay. Will it be the Afghans, who seem already to have bombed themselves back to a stone-age? Terrorists can hide successfully in mountains from any possible deployed army. The US is not trained in guerrilla warfare. From Alexander through to the Russian Iron Empire; no one has subdued these people for any significant period of time.

But some city will have to be reduced to dust, the American psyche needs it. That thirst for closure will open new avenues of hatred against the US, storing up a malignant harvest against a future generation of Americans. There must be at least a corner of almost everyone in the West that wants to see retribution. People are lining up at Army recruitment offices, blood will have blood. Commentators in Russia have suggested that a new Holy War between Christianity and Islam is in preparation. Some Arab journalists claim it all revolves around Israel; yet again that small plot of land changes our lives, yet again for the worse.

Stars and Stripes by the hundred thousand have been snapped up and unfurled and hung up and hung out. This business of flags had puzzled me on our recent trip to the US. In Rhode Island many of the houses sported large flags and often they were atop flagpoles thrust into front lawns. I asked American friends why the flag held such totemic significance. In reply I was told the following story.

My friend was driving past a fast food outlet, he could see that the flag outside it was slowly sliding down the pole. He stopped the car and just managed to rescue it before it was desecrated by touching the ground. He then folded it in the prescribed manner, took it into the shop and tore the manager off a strip in his outrage at the laziness and laxity of the staff. That highly charged totem was part of his identity as an American. We talked long about the differences between their outright patriotism and my cynicism, possibly a European trait. The purity of their fervour was enviable.  

The concept of the ‘special relationship’ was strong on their side. It seems clear that no matter what harebrained scheme their harebrained president will come up with; faithful old Britain will be there like an affectionate poodle. We laughed ruefully about what scrapes Bush Junior would get us into. Well we are not laughing now. Only one month later here we are floating together down this blackest of black rivers into rapids, probably a long and painfully jagged concourse of them.

We will be first to put our hand up and last to leave the stage.