July: Our Own Little Worlds

On the hottest day of the year so far, I phoned my brother in Finland. He showed me around his place in the forest with his phone-camera and the vegetation looked lush and green under grey cloudy skies. He had a mild moan about the weather. At something like 18 degrees on that particular morning, it was about six degrees less than the temperature during the previous night here. This was the culmination of the second official heat wave and we hadn’t yet seen off June. Finnish weather, he told me, had been nothing to glow about since his arrival three weeks before, but it sounded like the kind of summer I wrote about in flowery terms this time last year.

This year, the dial has clicked past 30 degrees on more days than I care to count. It makes my blood boil, triggering traumatic memories of 2003 when we camped on the land prior to house construction in a caravan during the hottest, driest summer on record. The Brother asked how we manage to stay cool. We do and we don’t, I explained, since coolness is relative. When you come in from the inferno outside, the house feels nice and cool, but on that hottest day of the year the digital thermometer above the dog’s basket registered 29 degrees by 4pm. Daphne had vacated her basket and was flaked out on the cooler clay tiles in a dark corner of the living area.

I sketched out our routine on such days: rise at 6am and open all shutters, doors and windows for an hour or so; do anything that needs doing outside, like watering pots and the paltry crop of vegetables that has survived thus far the heat and the attention of slugs and deer; walk the dog if she’s sufficient energy before breakfast; close back doors and shutters after breakfast, then the front set mid-morning once the sun has shifted southwards; work upstairs before the mezzanine level turns into Namibia, then retire after lunch to a darkened bedroom for any further work to be eked out between bouts of lethargy and sheer exhaustion; drive to river early evening with dog and spouse for swimming (or, in my case, to float, float on…); return to eat light dinner and open all doors, windows and shutters prior to evening entertainment and bed. Rinse and repeat…

There’s a lake near the Brother’s house in the forest, about a 45-minute drive north of Helsinki. When he and his partner bought it just a few years ago, it came with sauna, guest house and furniture and fittings, including boat – and all for about the price of a garage in central London. He told me that he bought a battery-operated outdoor motor for the boat and that they’ve had a couple of excursions during their stay this time, but a snake spotted in the water has put them off a plunge.

From the photos I’ve seen, the lake (presumably one of hundreds and thousands in the area) looks similar to but rather bigger than the lake near our old house in the wilds of the Corrèze. We would pick up Tilley the Kid from school and go there on hot days to swim and repose. The Good Wife is a good swimmer; she could swim from one side of the lake to the other and back again, often accompanied for at least some of the way by our old dog, Alfred Lord Sampson; Alfie, for short. When she swims in the Dordogne at our favourite spot near the village of Floirac, she sets off upstream and soon disappears from view. I know roughly where she is because she triggers the colony of frogs on the other side of the river. Their extraordinary racket echoes around the limestone cliffs on the opposite bank. Daphne doesn’t go with her, but restricts herself to intermittent sorties in pursuit of her tennis ball. Once bored, she tends to impersonate some kind of basking shark by trying to catch in her mouth the miniature aquatic life with which the river teems. Or she’ll wander into the undergrowth to sniff out scraps left by picnickers.

When there aren’t too many humans and/or mosquitoes, the river is one of the most heavenly places on earth. Apart from the occasional sound of a car heading along the road on the rive droit, or a barking dog, or a chorus of frogs, or a passing convoy of canoes, the silence is golden and the peace is total. The world and its woes – or ‘Civilization and its Discontents’ as baritone saxophonist Pepper Adams put it so elegantly – seem far, far away. The Brother told me how maybe four or five vehicles per day pass by their house in the pine forest. When they drive the 70 or so kilometres to visit his partner’s daughter, they encounter a mere clutch of cars on the road.

We talked about the curious course of existence whereby two such misanthropic siblings should somehow find their entirely different ways to two such different earthly paradises. ‘Back in our own little worlds, with nobody to bug us,’ as The Tubes once put it (which probably carbon-dates me). Finland is very different to France, of course, but what it lacks in the variety of its scenic wonders, it makes up for in the sheer good sense of a tiny population educated by the best system in the world and a pragmatic administration to find contentment in everyday life and communal harmony founded on trust. Were it not for my age and the daunting prospect of another major upheaval, I would be tempted to join the Brother there. I shall content myself with as many visits as I can manage: perhaps by means of a Eurorail ticket if I can plot a route up the west coast of Norway to the Arctic Circle and then down through Finland, then back home via the 30-hour ferry crossing from Helsinki to the north German coast and thence to south-west France.  

Whereas we packed up and went at a time of life when we were both comparatively footloose and fancy-free, both fuelled by a sense of adventure and equipped with vaguely transferable professional skills, the Brother was more hidebound by routine. A self-employed plumber by trade, it must have been difficult to jump off the hamster wheel, living in a part of Surrey where there’s money available for new heating systems and en suite bathrooms, and only a small pool of skilled and reliable professionals to fit them. Back now in England, he’s finishing his final bathroom before he packs up his bag of tools and disappears with his pension into a Guildford sunset. He’ll be free to take the long and winding road to Finland for as many days at a time as the post-Brexit regulations allow. At least until he and his partner have sorted out their visas and whatever else is required for a longer stay. I’ve undertaken to show him how my Wise app makes foreign exchange so much easier.

Finland, he tells me, is an equally attractive proposition in either summer or winter. I don’t doubt it. Winters here, too, were spectacular when the landscape was covered in snow. Now with virtually none, winters are no more than mild and agreeable. The Brother’s house came equipped with one of those high-performing ceramic wood-burning stoves that heats the efficiently insulated living space with ease. So he can go there when it’s minus-20 or even colder and hunker down far from the madding crowd and listen to pins dropping outside. Of course, though, you pay a price for paradise. In Finland, it’s the sociopathic enemy across the Gulf. The pragmatic populace, however, is geared up for invasion and ready as one to fight off again any Russian invaders with the kind of cunning, stealth and courage that they showed in the Winter War of 1939-40, which arguably showed Hitler that Russia could be defeated, thus changing the entire course of World War II.

Here in my own little isolated world in rural France, the price we pay is somewhat different: appalling anti-social driving, a multitude of undesirable insects, an impenetrable administration, a rigid unforgiving nationalism, which decrees that the only way is French, a total absence of Bombay mix… and the heat. It can only get hotter from here on in. If the Good Wife and I are to survive until we’re laid to rest, we must learn to adapt or die.  Exterior curtains and keen shutter management are all very well, but such things only save a degree or two at most. Whereas many lament the end of summer, I feel relief at each one passing without incident. For the moment, the bedroom is the coolest place in the house during the hottest part of the day. Bed is still the best place on earth, especially when cooled by a Dyson fan.