Helsinki

I touch down in Helsinki to find that summer is over. The sun still lights up the impossibly gold domes on the Russian cathedral, but the air has shifted. It’s becoming crisp: autumn isn’t far away. My hotel is next to a park named after Tove Jansson – she used to play there as a child. They held the naming ceremony a few months ago, with people dressed as Moomins. It makes me feel guilty that her memoir sat untouched in my bag throughout my flight (weeks later I read it and envy her talent, her cool, clean sentences).

Leaving the hotel, my wife and I see people selling their belongings on street corners and outside the arts centre: childhood toys, books, video cassettes. I can’t see why anyone would want to buy these things, and it seems jarring in such a prosperous country. Only when I return home and Google do I discover that it’s a twice yearly Finnish tradition, like spring cleaning. It explains the happy community feel, and the fact that nobody seems to care whether they sell anything or not. It lacks the desperation I’ve always associated with car boot sales.

The modern art gallery, a huge, beautiful edifice, is full of pieces about nothing. “The artist has provided a blank screen, and viewers are invited to superimpose their own images” in one room, “The artist tried to produce as flat an image as possible, to challenge the viewer’s opinion of art” in another. I know art expects something of the person looking at it, but I resent being asked to do so much of the work.

In another room, I find a better piece – a room filled with a million blank Finnish passports. I’m always dubious about art you can’t understand without reading the blurb, but this one’s clever: Finland is very strict on immigration, and if it had taken in as many people as other countries it would have a million extra citizens. It’s a difficult concept to process, even staring at that colossal block, made up of tiny blue-covered booklets. Each one a person, each one a life, a family, a tangle of friends. A whole network that was never allowed to exist.

Politically, everyone likes to talk about the disappeared: people who used to be here and are gone. But when I think about Helsinki, strolling along the harbour’s edge, sitting in beautiful coffee shops, all chalkboards and exposed brick, about playing cards in the bar or eating pizza in a neighbourhood restaurant, I’m struck instead by the never arrived. No black or brown faces. Almost no beggars. No charity shops and seemingly no need for them. Would those million people have changed that?

When I get home, people ask me what I thought of Helsinki. I tell them that I liked it but that I wouldn’t recommend it. “It’s very expensive”, I say. There’s more – there’s always more – but beyond that the reasons become just too difficult to explain.