Property in New Zealand may be getting snapped up by American tech billionaires fleeing the Trumpocalypse but I have a suggestion for anxious Guardian readers of more modest means: Finland.
This nation of snowy winters has air so clean Chinese tourists take trips to Lapland to breathe it, a feted education system, and is currently trialling an unconditional basic income. My first impression when I visited last week was also of a nation resolute enough to resist globalised conformity: Helsinki airport baggage hall is adorned with badly stuffed wolverines and snowy-white hares, testimony to its marvellous wealth of wildlife – and love of hunting.
Five hours north of Helsinki, in beautiful North Karelia, I saw fairytale shacks falling into ruin (yours for about €20,000) because urbanites no longer crave a summer by a mosquito-infested swamp in a hut with no plumbing.
Of course Finland is experiencing familiar insecurities, from tension over immigration to a booming Eurosceptic far-right party. Mechanisation has stripped jobs from the timber industry; Finland’s former tech pin-up Nokia has stumbled badly; and unemployment runs at 7.9%. Ordinary Finns I met criticised their pro-business government.
I was researching a story about hunting, a pursuit enjoyed by 300,000 Finns. Unlike Britain, there are no aristocratic iterations such as fox-hunting on horseback and no industrial-scale shooting of pheasants and grouse. But Finland’s hunting rules allow the shooting of a small number of lynx, bears and wolves.
This is controversial – but as someone from a country that obliterated its big carnivores centuries ago, I won’t judge.
After a week imbibing Finland’s clean air and pragmatism, I returned to Britain to discover that bird flu has broken out among farmed pheasants; David Cameron has joked he’s found solace in calling the pheasants he blasts out of the skies Boris and Michael; and a hunt master has resigned as a local councillor after a foul-mouthed tirade against a female saboteur. No stuffed partridges at Gatwick airport, though.
Call me a taxi(dermist)
I was boasting before Christmas about the virtues of a taxidermied chaffinch as an alternative toy for my five-year-old twins but I may have spawned a monster.
While Chris Packham was logging four nuthatches, three greater spotted woodpeckers and two stock doves in his entry for last weekend’s RSPB’s Big Garden Birdwatch, my garden served up a few wood pigeons, a couple of blackbirds and a dead starling, which my daughter found mysteriously expired on our lawn.
The chaffinch has set an unbreakable precedent and so the gorgeously glossy black and iridescent-feathered starling must join the roadkill squirrel waiting patiently in my freezer for a date with the taxidermist.
Where will this end? Last night I searched high and low for a mysteriously missing pillow. I eventually discovered that the twins had turned it into a bed for my ancient, taxidermied badger.
Electric dreams
We live in such extraordinary times that we will surely solve London’s smog problem quicker than the Victorians managed to solve theirs. The Chinese-backed London Taxi Company starting production of a new generation of electric-hybrid black taxis this spring is a good start. I, for one, will happily submit to a government ban on my old diesel car. Just please don’t come for my woodburning stove.
