Life · Field notes REF / KEKRI

Two Festivals and a Tarpaulin

My first Halloween in Finland landed on the same Saturday as Pyhäinpäivä, the day Finns light candles on their family graves. I spent most of it in a shopping centre, an IKEA and a JYSK, and the most interesting thing I saw all day was a sheet of fabric lying over a pile of last winter’s snow.

Espoo — November 2026

Saturday was 31 October, which made it Halloween, and it was my first one here. It was also Pyhäinpäivä. That is not a coincidence in the sense of two things landing on the same date by accident; it is closer to the opposite. Pyhäinpäivä is a moveable feast that always falls on a Saturday, and this year the Saturday it fell on was the 31st.

So the country spent one day doing two entirely different things about death, in two entirely different registers, and I walked past both of them without initially noticing that the second one existed.

The day underneath

Pyhäinpäivä is All Saints’ Day, and in Finland it is a candle day. Families go to the cemetery at dusk and light a candle on the grave, and because it is dark by five and the graves are close together, the result is a field of small lights. The Espoo parishes had thousands of them out across the city on Saturday, at Kellonummi, at the cathedral hill, at Tapiola, at Leppävaara, at Espoonlahti. The cemeteries were open around the clock for the weekend. There were angel trails laid out for children, with a recommendation to bring a torch.

In the Espoo parishes’ announcement of the day, one of their pastors, Marja Malvaranta, described the lights as telling “of longing and hope” — kaipauksesta ja toivosta. It is the sort of line that would sound like public relations in English and does not here.

I did not go. I did not know it was happening until afterwards, which is the honest version of what it is like to arrive somewhere: you get the imported festival first, because it is loud and it is in the shops, and you find the local one later.

Two things about it surprised me when I went looking. The first is that the date moves because it was made to move, twice. It sat on 1 November until the calendar reform of 1772, which shifted the church observance to the first Sunday in November; in 1955 it moved again, to the Saturday falling between the 31st and the 6th. Which means Finland gave up having a fixed eve of All Saints — the thing that anchors Halloween to 31 October everywhere else — two and a half centuries ago. Whether or not that is the cause, the effect is not in doubt: there is no agreed Finnish date. When Yle looked at this in 2024, Tornio was pointing people at the last day of October and Joensuu at the 1st of November.

The second is that the candles are not ancient. The custom of lighting them on graves dates from the Second World War. The tradition that an imported festival is supposedly elbowing aside is about eighty years old, which is older than Halloween here but not by as much as anyone assumes.

The Espoo parish announcement about Saturday runs to several hundred words about candles, angel trails, concerts and opening hours. It does not mention Halloween once.

Finland already had one

Here is the part I did not know. Finland had its own version of this, and it was closer to Halloween than Halloween is.

It was called kekri, and it was the old Finnish year-turn — the new year before Christmas took that job. It was not fixed to a date; it happened when that particular farm had finished its harvest, which is a very practical way to schedule a festival. The dead came back for it. The host went out the evening before to welcome them in, and a sauna was heated and cleaned for them, with meat and drink laid out, and the following evening he saw them out again bareheaded. That much is in a Finnish account written down in 1754. The further detail that he met them at the edge of the yard and sent them off with a libation of brandy and beer comes from Uno Holmberg, writing in 1927.

And people went round the houses in costume. They dressed as the kekripukki — the kekri goat — and the kekritär, and demanded hospitality, and threatened to break the oven if they did not get it. That is trick-or-treat, several centuries early, with a better threat.

Kekri faded through the 1800s as it merged into Christian Pyhäinpäivä, and had largely died out by the early twentieth century. Its customs did not vanish so much as emigrate into Christmas and New Year. The kekripukki itself is reckoned to be the ancestor of Joulupukki, the Finnish Father Christmas.

It is being revived, modestly. On the same Saturday afternoon that I spent looking at a witch’s cave in a shopping centre, a kekri festival — Viaporin kekri — was setting up on Suomenlinna. It ran from four until ten.

Iso Omena

I went to Iso Omena in the afternoon, which is the big shopping centre at Matinkylä, attached to a metro station and roughly the size of a small town. There was a queue of children winding back from what appeared to be a witch’s cave.

The thing that struck me was not the cave. It was the queue. It was precisely, structurally, emotionally the same queue children form for Santa Claus: the same shuffle, the same parents holding coats, the same child at the front who has reconsidered. A country that has a strong claim on the original Santa Claus has imported a second seasonal queue from America and runs it the same way — and the Finnish Santa, as I found out the next morning, is descended from the costumed figure who used to do the door-knocking at the festival Halloween replaced. I have no photograph of it, because I am not going to photograph other people’s children.

The party shop inside Iso Omena was discounting trick-or-treat pumpkin buckets from 27 October to 1 November, which is six days. Hedging across six days is what you do when nobody can tell you which evening the children are coming. Because there is no agreed date, some Finnish municipalities have started issuing guidance. Muurame, in Central Finland, surveyed its residents — more than six hundred replies — and recommended that door-knocking happen on the Saturday before Pyhäinpäivä. Opinion was sharply divided. The council’s community participation and culture manager, Johanna Pitkälä, put it plainly: some people think it a very nice festival and some were completely against it. What they agreed on was not wanting children at the door on Pyhäinpäivä itself.

Halloween is not in the Finnish almanac, and the director of the University of Helsinki’s Almanac Office, Minna Saarelma-Paukkala, has set out why. The American-style version — commercial, carnival-like — is a new tradition here. It has no settled Finnish name: kummitusjuhla, haamuaatto and kurpitsajuhla have all been floated and none has stuck. And choosing a date would be difficult in any case, she says, because Finns celebrate on such different days. There is also the question of what it would sit beside. Pyhäinpäivä is a solemn holiday, the day you go to the graves and remember your dead, and ghosts and pumpkins do not obviously belong there. She would rather new calendar days came up out of Finland’s own traditions than arrived with American cultural influence. Kekri never made it into the calendar either.

Eight countries, one menu

We have a house to move into later this month, so the rest of the day was the kind of errand that only makes sense when you have an empty set of rooms and a date. IKEA first — the one on Espoontie, which is the Espoo store.

IKEA Espoo, Espoontie. Same blue box, different car park.

I have now shopped in IKEA in at least eight countries, and the thing I check every time is the restaurant menu. It is the same. Meatballs, the hot dog, the cinnamon bun, the soft drink you fill yourself. There are local items at the edges — IKEA does vary the margins by market, and the Finnish board has things the Spanish one does not — but the centre of it does not move. You can land in a country whose language you cannot read a word of and be served the same lunch you had in Málaga.

Lunch. I did not have the meatballs, but the cinnamon bun is the part that is the same everywhere.

Then JYSK, which is the Danish version of the same idea, and which we already knew perfectly well from Spain. We will need furniture. Not all of it is coming with us, because a great deal of what works on the Costa del Sol does not work in Helsinki. Outdoor furniture designed for eleven months of sun. Rugs chosen to be cool underfoot. The whole logic of a house built to keep heat out, being unpicked and rebuilt in a house designed to keep heat in.

GrIFK U16

Before dinner we went to the ice hockey. GrIFK under-16s against TPS Akatemia, a Mestis-karsintaottelu — a Mestis qualifier — at 18:50 on Saturday night in Kauniainen. GrIFK have been going since 1925 and TPS since 1922, though both came to hockey later than that.

Through the netting behind the goal. I understood almost none of it.

The rink also streams its games live, with a camera that follows an individual player through the match. For a municipal rink running an under-16 fixture on a Saturday night, that is a surprising amount of kit.

I am no clearer on the rules than I was before. I understand roughly that there are lines on the ice and that crossing them in the wrong order is a problem, and that the play stops constantly for reasons that are evident to everybody in the building except me. I have resolved not to look any of it up for a while. There is a specific pleasure in watching a sport you do not understand, and it does not last, so there is no sense hurrying it.

I am going to a lot more of these. That much is obvious.

The snow they kept from last year

The rink sits beside Granibacken, the ski slope in Kauniainen, which has been running since 1934 and is the only downhill ski centre inside Ring III. It is not open. No slope in southern Finland was spinning lifts this weekend.

But on the hill there is a large pale sheet lying over a mound, and under the sheet is snow from last winter.

Granibacken after dark. The pale shape in the middle distance is the sheet, and under it is last winter.

I had vaguely assumed this was a tarpaulin keeping the rain off something. It is the opposite of that, and the physics is genuinely interesting. The enemy of a stored snow pile is not warm air, which does surprisingly little — raise the air temperature by five degrees and you lose around three per cent of the snow depth — it is sunlight. In the Alps the cover is sawdust, thirty to forty centimetres of it, and the Swiss avalanche institute at Davos measured what that does: with forty centimetres on top, only about nine per cent of the net short-wave radiation is left available to melt anything. Take the cover off and the energy available to melt the pile is nearly twelve times higher.

The counter-intuitive part is that the cover is not simply a blanket. It works wet. Evaporation from the damp sawdust consumes energy that would otherwise have gone into the snow, and the warmed cover radiates that heat away to the sky at night. Which means rain is not the enemy either. The Davos modelling found that adding extra rain made no real difference — but removing it altogether, a summer with no rain at all, made the pile melt considerably faster.

How bright the cover is matters more than you would think: a study of a stored pile at low altitude in Vermont found the albedo of the cover mattered more than its insulating value, and a cover that gets dirty over the summer works less well than a clean one. Which is why the Finnish version does not use sawdust at all. The Finns engineered it: seventy-millimetre extruded polystyrene laminated inside PVC, made into mats four metres wide and eighteen long that fold out like an accordion, with a white geotextile over the top to hold them down. Levi has used around four hundred of them.

It works better than it has any right to. Real-world losses run anywhere from thirteen to fifty per cent across a summer, averaging somewhere near a quarter to a third — and a good deal of what looks like loss is the pile compacting under its own weight rather than melting at all. At Davos they measured seventy-four per cent of the volume surviving but eighty-three per cent of the mass. A well-built pile comes through to October with about three-quarters of its snow, and it comes through dense — around six hundred kilograms per cubic metre by the autumn.

This is not a fringe technique here. Levi and Ruka both opened on Friday 2 October this year, entirely on snow kept from last winter. Levi’s first lift went at nine in the morning, on something close to three hundred thousand cubic metres carried through the summer, by press accounts; Ruka opened three lifts on about a hundred and fifty thousand, of which as much as four-fifths survived. A month later they are still, as far as I can tell, the only two open in the country, on a base reported at around forty centimetres in late October. Levi started doing this after its World Cup races were lost to poor snow in 2007, 2011 and 2015, which tells you what the technique is actually for. Granibacken only began storing snow itself in the winter of 2024.

A pile of last winter under a sheet, so that this winter can start on time.

There is something very Finnish about the whole arrangement, and it is the same thing I keep running into: the problem is identified, measured, engineered around, and then not mentioned again. Nobody at the rink was looking at the hill.

Cars, snow blowers, road bikes

Dinner was at a colleague’s house, and the conversation was cars, snow blowers and road bikes, in that order and with roughly equal seriousness. I have never previously been in a discussion where the snow blower section ran longest, and I suspect that by March I will understand why.

They have a labrador. A blonde one, like ours.

I expected them to be the same, and they are. Entirely the same. The same optimism about food that is not theirs, the same conviction that they are smaller than they are, the same unerring instinct for the one patch of mud in an otherwise clean landscape, and above all the same absolute commitment to informing the household that somebody is at the door — delivered at volume, with total confidence, and approximately four seconds before the doorbell actually rings.

Three thousand four hundred kilometres north as the crow flies, and a good deal further by road. Different language, different weather, different everything. Same dog, same job, same timing.

Ends

REF / KEKRI — written in Espoo, three weeks before the furniture arrives.

History · Field notes REF / 1944

The Bill for Getting Out

Finland stopped fighting the Soviet Union on 4 September 1944. What it got for stopping was a second war, on its own soil, against the army it had been fighting alongside the week before — and then eight years of reparations, and a Soviet naval base whose boundary ran through what is now my side of the city.

Espoo — October 2026

A film called Lapin sota opened here eight days ago, on 23 October. Aku Louhimies directed it, which in Finland is roughly the level of event that a new Nolan is elsewhere, and it runs for two hours and thirty-seven minutes. It sold 80,178 tickets between the Friday and the Sunday — the best opening weekend a Finnish film has had this decade — and passed a hundred thousand admissions on the Tuesday. I have not seen it, because it is in Finnish with Finnish and Swedish subtitles, and sitting through a hundred and fifty-seven minutes of dialogue I cannot follow seemed like a poor use of an evening. So I did the other thing. I went and read about what it is about, and then I kept reading, and this is what came out.

I have written a piece about why this country is so well prepared — the shelters under the swimming pools, the grain reserve held by the importers, the 900,000 reservists, the whole of it written down in numbers and kept up year after year by a country nobody is currently attacking. It is finished but not published yet; it will go up here shortly, and this is its companion. In it I start the clock in 1939, spend a single line on “then it fought again from 1941 to 1944”, and jump straight to February 1947 and the peace treaty whose weapons ceiling accidentally produced the best-defended small country in Europe.

There is a three-year hole in the middle of that, and I have since worked out that the hole is the part that explains the rest of it.

The deadline Finland set for itself

The sequence matters here, so here it is properly.

On 24 August 1944 Finland asked Moscow for terms. On the 29th the Soviet Union replied with preliminary conditions, and the first of them was not about territory or money. It was that Finland must publicly break with Germany and publicly demand that German troops leave Finnish soil by 15 September. If any were still there after that date, Finland was to disarm them and hand them over to the Soviet high command as prisoners of war.

On 2 September the Finnish parliament approved the conditions in a secret session by 108 votes to 45. Finland broke off relations with Germany the same day, Prime Minister Hackzell announced it on the radio, Mannerheim wrote to Hitler, and the demand went out. Finnish guns stopped firing at seven o’clock on the morning of 4 September. The Soviets stopped a day later, having spent the extra twenty-four hours shelling.

So the deadline was thirteen days away, and it was nominally Finland’s own. It appeared over a Finnish signature, in a Finnish broadcast, as a Finnish demand. It had been written in Moscow.

Thirteen days to remove an army of two hundred and fourteen thousand men from a region the size of Portugal, in autumn, over a road network with one usable route north and a railway that terminated well short of the border.

Exhibit — September 1944

24 Aug Finland asks for terms. 29 Aug Soviet preliminary conditions: break with Germany, demand withdrawal by 15 September, disarm whoever remains. 30 Aug Mannerheim assents. 2 Sept Parliament approves, 108–45, in secret session; relations with Germany broken; the demand is broadcast. 4 Sept Finnish ceasefire at 07:00. 6 Sept the Interior Ministry orders the evacuation of Lapland. 7 Sept the delegation leaves for Moscow. 14 Sept Hackzell suffers a stroke mid-negotiation; Walden takes the terms from Molotov. 15 Sept the deadline expires and the fighting starts the same day. 19 Sept the Moscow Armistice is signed.

Suursaari, 15 September

The deadline did not pass quietly and then curdle into fighting over the following weeks. It ended, and the war began, on the same day, in the Gulf of Finland.

Germany had a plan for the island of Suursaari — Hogland — and executed it that night. Around 2,700 German troops landed against a Finnish garrison of 1,712. It went very badly for them. Soviet aircraft flew 481 close-support sorties over the island in Finland’s favour, which is a sentence that would have been unimaginable a fortnight earlier. At a quarter to seven in the evening Commodore Karl-Conrad Mecke surrendered unconditionally to Lieutenant Colonel Martti Miettinen.

German losses: 155 killed, 1,231 taken prisoner, about ten vessels. Finnish losses: 36 killed, 67 wounded, 8 missing.

That is the first day of the new war, and the shape of the whole thing is already in it. Finland was not choosing to fight Germany. Germany attacked a Finnish island because the alliance had ended, and Finland defended it with Soviet aircraft overhead.

The armistice did not set the deadline

Here is the detail that made me stop and read the clause three times.

The Moscow Armistice was signed on 19 September 1944 — four days after the deadline had expired and the shooting had started. And when you read Article 2, it does not set a deadline at all. It cannot: the date had gone. What it does instead is oblige Finland to disarm the German forces

… which have remained in Finland since the 15th September, 1944

and hand the personnel over as prisoners of war. The date appears in the treaty only looking backwards, as a fact already established, describing men who were by then already an obligation rather than a deadline.

I had this wrong when I started. I assumed the armistice imposed the deadline and Finland failed to meet it. It is worse than that, and more instructive. Finland issued the demand itself, under dictation, two and a half weeks before signing anything — and the document it eventually signed simply took it as read that the demand had failed, and converted the residue into a debt of bodies to be delivered.

Which is a precise description of the position the country was in. It had no political options left. As the historian Oula Silvennoinen puts it, Germany controlled Finland’s imports and exports; the alternatives had run out. You cannot negotiate your way out of a war when both of the people you are negotiating with can starve you.

Two hundred and fourteen thousand

The German 20th Mountain Army in Finland numbered around 214,000 men under Generaloberst Lothar Rendulic. For scale: Finland’s entire peacetime army, under the ceiling imposed three years later, would be 34,400.

And the same armistice that required Finland to expel them also required Finland to demobilise. Both clauses, same document, same signatures, running concurrently. The country was to put its army away and simultaneously use it to evict a force several times the size of what it was permitted to keep.

Men were being released from service in the south while, in the north, the ones who had not yet been released were fighting a new war against the troops they had spent three years supplying. A good deal of the Finnish fighting in Lapland was done by units that were, on paper, in the process of being disbanded.

Where 214,000 men went. The US Army’s own study map of the German withdrawal, autumn 1944 into spring 1945 — north through Lapland, then west into occupied Norway. James F. Gebhardt, Combat Studies Institute, US Army Command and General Staff College, 1989. Public domain.

Everybody out

On 6 September — two days after the ceasefire with the Soviet Union, nine days before the deadline — the Interior Ministry ordered Lapland emptied of civilians.

The main movement ran from 7 September to 20 October. Where the figures are firmest, in Martti Ursin’s study of the destruction and reconstruction of northern Finland, the registered evacuation of Lapland province comes to 103,885 people: 56,417 over the border into Sweden, and 47,468 to the rest of Finland, mostly Ostrobothnia. Veterans’ organisations and the University of Helsinki use a larger figure — 168,000, put at about three-quarters of the population, or “over 150,000” — which probably takes in the neighbouring parts of Oulu province and people who simply went, without being registered going. I have not been able to reconcile the two, and I am not going to pretend I can.

They were gone a long time. In January 1945 there were still 57,800 Finns in Sweden. Organised return began that December, from Ostrobothnia around the turn of the year and from Sweden in the spring; most repatriations were finished by July 1945 and most people were home by that autumn. Some of the children did not come back until early 1947. Call it eight to twelve months, for about a hundred thousand people, in a country of under four million.

It is worth sitting with the fact that this worked. An administration that had just lost a war, was paying off another one, and was simultaneously fighting a third in the region being emptied, moved a hundred thousand civilians out of a province in six weeks, and got almost all of them back within a year. That is not a small thing, and it is almost entirely missing from the story this country tells about itself — a point I will come back to.

What was left

The Germans burned Lapland on the way out. Not in a frenzy, but on orders issued in stages: on 6 October demolition was restricted to military targets, on the 9th it was extended to government buildings, and on the 13th to everything in northern Finland that an enemy might conceivably use.

Lapland, autumn 1944

What	Destroyed
Buildings across the province	about 14,800
Road bridges, of 752	728
Rovaniemi market town’s building stock	87% — 1,201 buildings
Rovaniemi rural municipality	60% — 2,224 buildings
Lapland railway, working again	1957

Building figures from Ursin (1980). The number you will usually see quoted for Rovaniemi is “about 90 per cent”, and the city’s own heritage material says 93; the 87 per cent figure is the one that traces to a statistical compilation. Note which Rovaniemi is meant: the town lost almost everything, the surrounding rural municipality lost three-fifths.

Of Lapland’s 752 road bridges, twenty-four survived.

Rovaniemi burned on 14 October, and the way it burned is contested in a way I did not expect. An ammunition train had been left standing at the railway station — around four hundred tonnes of artillery shells, no locomotive. At 10:45 it went up. The detonations went on for hours, shells landed beyond the edge of the town, and the blast was violent enough to throw the German demolition charges on the Suutarinkorva bridge, three kilometres away, into the river.

The town was mostly wooden. That was effectively the end of it.

There is a long-standing Finnish story that the train was sabotaged. Docent Matti Enbuske of the University of Oulu, who has gone through the German documents, says they record it as an accident — a stove knocked over — and that nothing supports the sabotage account. Historians also disagree about how much of the destruction the explosion actually caused, given that the systematic burning had already begun the day before, and I could not find anyone willing to put a percentage on it. So I am not going to put one on it either. What can be said is that the town was being burned deliberately, and that an accident in the middle of it made the burning worse.

Finnish military losses across the whole Lapland War were comparatively light — 774 killed, 262 missing, 2,904 wounded. German losses were about a thousand dead and some 1,300 taken prisoner. The cost was never meant to be read in casualties. It was a province.

And there is a cold observation from Silvennoinen that I think belongs here, because the restraint in the north is sometimes mistaken for decency. Germany’s northern war, he writes, was held in check by long distances and by the fact that almost no civilians were left in German hands — not by any greater gentleness. The evacuation is the reason the Lapland War has a low civilian death toll. Not the conduct of the people doing the burning.

The town that was drawn twice

Rovaniemi has a good second act and a disappointing third one, and both are relevant.

Alvar Aalto began work on a new plan for the destroyed town in January 1945, finished it that December, and had it confirmed in May 1946. It is the famous poronsarvi — the reindeer-antler plan, the street layout drawn in the shape of antlers, with hexagonal plots. It is one of the more striking pieces of twentieth-century European town planning, and it is the thing everyone tells you about Rovaniemi after they have told you about Santa.

In 1948 an amendment converted most of the hexagonal plots to four-cornered ones. Twenty hexagonal plots survive, around Aseveliaukea, Miehentie and Teerikatu. The art historian Pirjo Lukkarinen’s verdict is that the plan “never received an execution worthy of it”.

So the most celebrated thing about the reconstruction is a drawing that was substantially undone within two years of being approved, by a country that had other things to pay for. Which is its own small commentary on the period. (The Aalto Centre — the library, Lappia-talo, the city hall — is a separate commission from the 1960s onwards, not the antler plan realised. I had these muddled and I suspect I am not the only one.)

Paid in goods

Then the bill.

The armistice set reparations at 300 million US dollars, at 1938 gold value, payable not in money but in goods, over six years. Not goods Finland had — goods the Soviet Union specified: ships, cable, machinery, rolling stock, prefabricated buildings. A country with a forestry economy was required to deliver, on a schedule, the output of a metals and engineering industry it did not yet have.

So it built one. That is the standard account of where Finnish heavy industry came from, and it is broadly right.

The schedule was extended from six years to eight at the end of 1945, and in the summer of 1948 the sum itself was cut, to somewhere around 225 to 226.5 million. The final delivery crossed the border at Vainikkala on 18 September 1952.

You will often read that Finland was the only country to pay its war reparations in full. I wanted that to be true and I cannot stand it up. It is asserted in Finnish popular accounts without a comparative source, and it is absent from several of the more careful Finnish treatments. What is defensible, and is quite enough: Finland delivered everything that was finally demanded of it, in goods, inside the schedule — while noting that the sum demanded had been reduced by the creditor four years before the end, which sits a little awkwardly next to the phrase “in full”.

The boundary at Kivenlahti

The last clause is the one that gets least attention outside Finland and is the easiest to feel.

The armistice leased the Porkkala peninsula to the Soviet Union for fifty years, at five million markka a year, as a naval base. Between 380 and 400 square kilometres of land, closer to a thousand if you count the water. It swallowed the municipality of Degerby entirely, two-thirds of Kirkkonummi and almost half of Siuntio.

All 7,272 residents were given ten days to leave. They were out by 29 September 1944, taking what they could carry away from farms their families had worked for generations.

The eastern boundary of the leased area ran at the Kivenlahti bridge. That is in Espoo. It is on my side of the city, about fifteen minutes from where I am writing this, and it was the edge of a Soviet military zone within living memory. Trains between Helsinki and Turku ran through the territory with the blinds down and Soviet guards aboard.

It came back on 26 January 1956, at three o’clock in the afternoon, twelve years into a fifty-year lease, and thirty-eight years before it was due to expire.

1956: the residents going back. They had been given ten days to get out in September 1944, and the land stayed inside a Soviet naval base for the eleven years in between. JOKA Journalistinen kuva-arkisto, Museovirasto. CC BY 4.0.

And then, finally, a treaty

The Paris Peace Treaty was signed on 10 February 1947, and in the piece that is still sitting unpublished I treat its Article 13 as the hinge of the whole story — the weapons ceiling that Finland turned, by omission, into the reserve doctrine that the rest of Europe is now copying.

I still think that is right. But I had the treaty in the wrong place in the sequence, and I only worked that out by writing this one. I had it as the beginning of something. It was the end of something: the formal conclusion of a two-and-a-half-year process in which this country had already been required to expel its former ally by a deadline written for it in Moscow, burn out of its own northernmost province, demobilise while fighting, empty a region of civilians, start paying an industrial tribute it had to build an industry to pay, and hand over the ground where its capital’s western suburbs now stand.

By February 1947, the lesson had been taught and taken. The treaty did not create the Finnish posture. It was the last clause of the thing that created it.

And then in 1948 came the YYA treaty with the Soviet Union, and the forty-year balancing act that the rest of Europe got to call Finlandisation from a comfortable distance.

Why it took eighty years to film

Which brings me back to the cinema, and to the question I started with: why is a major film about this only appearing now?

Because the Lapland War is, in the Finnish phrase that the scholarship actually uses, vaikea kulttuuriperintö — difficult heritage. Eerika Koskinen-Koivisto of the University of Jyväskylä describes Lapland’s wartime sites as

… either contested or, for some reason, bypassed and forgotten.

Only a handful have any heritage protection. Most have no memorial and no sign. German memorials have attracted opposition and vandalism.

The reasons the historians give are not the ones an outsider would guess. Silvennoinen points to Lapland’s small population and to the south treating it as peripheral — but mostly to the fact that Karelian organisations dominated the memory culture of loss. Finland had one enormous evacuation story to tell and it told the Karelian one; a hundred thousand people from Lapland did not get a look in. The veterans’ association puts it flatly: when wartime evacuation is discussed, only the fate of the Karelians is mentioned, and Lapland’s vast operation is forgotten.

Ville Kivimäki adds a sharper one. The Lapland War could be treated as something not of Finland’s own doing — dictated by Moscow — which makes it easy to set aside. And underneath it sits the part that is genuinely uncomfortable: to remember the Lapland War properly, you have to remember what came before it, which is three years of co-belligerency with Nazi Germany. There is scholarship arguing that focusing the memorials on the fight against the Germans has served, conveniently, to distance the memory of the arrangement with them.

And then there is the commercial reason. Koskinen-Koivisto names Rovaniemi’s Santa Claus Village as an example of a dark past played down because it does not suit the brand. The town that was burned to the ground in 1944 now sells itself, at scale and very successfully, as the home of Father Christmas.

One nuance she is careful about, and so am I: her interviewees did not generally find the subject painful or shameful, and did not say it had been hushed up in families or villages. The forgetting is institutional and national. In Lapland they remember it fine.

So who won?

It is worth asking plainly, because the answer is not tidy, and the untidiness is the whole point.

Finland lost the Winter War. People here will sometimes call it a defensive victory and you can see why, but the formal record is a defeat. Finland sued for peace, and in March 1940 it signed away about a tenth of its land area — the Karelian Isthmus with Viipuri, Ladoga Karelia, part of Salla, part of Petsamo — and the war left over 420,000 people to be resettled. By the end the army on the Isthmus was close to spent and Mannerheim was advising the government to take the terms. That is not a stalemate, whatever else it is.

And yet the Soviet Union failed. On the second day of the invasion it installed a puppet government at Terijoki, which tells you plainly enough what the war was for, and three months later it was negotiating with the government it had meant to replace, the puppet quietly dropped. Finland kept its independence, its army and its political system. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, within months, kept none of theirs.

Finland lost the war and kept the thing it was fighting for. That is the pattern, and 1944 runs it again at a higher price.

Because the same verdict arrives in 1944 with a larger invoice. Finland was not occupied. There was no Soviet administration in Helsinki, no show trials of the kind held elsewhere, no absorption. It kept its parliament, its borders in the main, and the right to run its own affairs — and it paid for that with a tenth of its land gone, a province burned, a hundred thousand people moved twice, eight years of tribute, and a foreign naval base inside commuting distance of the capital.

So: not a victory, and not a defeat in the sense of the word that applied in Tallinn or Riga or Warsaw. Something with no good single word for it — a country that stayed itself, and was invoiced for the privilege over eleven years.

The point

Finland never drew a peace dividend. It is the one thing everybody notices about the place and the explanation is usually given as geography — a long border, a difficult neighbour, so of course they stayed ready. I think the border is the smaller half of it. The larger half is that this country has a precise, documented, institutional memory of how long a war goes on after it has officially finished.

The last time this country was told its war was over, the following happened. The ceasefire came on 4 September. A new war started on the 15th. The province where it was fought was burned to the ground and a hundred thousand people were moved out of it. The army was demobilised and simultaneously sent to fight. An eight-year tribute began, payable in goods a forestry economy had to industrialise to produce. Seven thousand people lost their homes in Porkkala in ten days, and the land stayed gone for eleven years. And the formal peace treaty, the one that put a ceiling on the army, did not arrive until February 1947 — two and a half years after the shooting was supposed to have stopped.

That is what “the war ended” meant, within the lifetime of the grandparents of people I work with.

And then count forward from the ceasefire rather than from the peace treaty, which is the only honest way to do it. Eight years until the last reparations train crossed the border at Vainikkala. Eleven until Porkkala came back. Thirteen before the railway through Lapland ran properly again. On 4 September 1944 the guns stopped; the consequences ran until 1957.

So when Finnish preparedness gets described abroad as pessimism, or as a reaction to 2022, I would offer that it is neither. It is a country that has been shown the measurement — not the principle, the measurement, in years, with receipts — and has declined to forget it.

Postscript

On the film: as of writing there are no English-subtitled screenings in Finland that I can find — every listing I checked gives Finnish dialogue with Finnish and Swedish subtitles. Beta Cinema has taken international sales, so a subtitled version exists and will surface abroad in due course. If you are in the same position I am, that is the one to wait for. If anyone spots an English-subtitled screening in the capital region, I would genuinely like to know.

Two numbers above are unresolved rather than settled, and I have flagged them where they appear: the size of the Lapland evacuation, where the registered figure and the commonly quoted one differ by sixty thousand people, and the share of Rovaniemi’s destruction attributable to the ammunition train, which nobody seems willing to quantify and neither will I.

Note

The film’s main partner is Veikkaus, the Finnish state gambling operator, which announced its backing in September 2026 and describes it as a continuation of the collaboration that began with Tuntematon sotilas. No figure is disclosed. The production company is Backmann & Hoderoff. Veikkaus’s announcement is here. Disclosure: I work for Veikkaus.

Ends

REF / 1944 — written in Espoo, fifteen minutes from where the Soviet zone used to start.

Consumer · Field notes REF / EZY3771

Every Mistake Went the Same Way

A cancelled easyJet flight, a regulation that is admirably clear, and four decisions that were all wrong in the same direction. I got most of the money back. What I want to talk about is what it cost to get it.

Espoo — October 2026

A few weeks ago Lucy and I were lucky enough to go to a wedding at the top of a category 3 climb, overlooking a lake in northern Italy. Cyclists will know precisely what that means, and will also know that the view at the top is usually worth it. Everybody else can take it as a long way up a narrow road. The wedding was wonderful.

The journey home was ruined by easyJet.

The text message arrived at 16:49. The flight was due to leave Milan Malpensa for Malaga at 19:20. That is two and a half hours' notice, which under European law is both late enough to owe compensation and early enough that we were still in a taxi rather than at a gate.

What follows is not really a complaint about a cancelled flight. Aircraft break and crews run out of hours, and easyJet accepted from the outset that this one was cancelled for crew reasons, which is to say not for anything outside its control. The regulation anticipates all of that. It is one of the clearer pieces of consumer law in Europe, it has been in force since 2005, and easyJet publishes its own summary of it.

The complaint is about what happened next, over seven weeks and five letters, and about the single pattern running through all of it.

Four decisions

There were four substantive decisions in this case. Here they are in order.

The compensation was assessed at €125 per passenger. The correct figure was €250: the distance is 1,487 kilometres, which easyJet itself confirmed, and that falls in the band easyJet itself publishes. The halving was achieved by treating Barcelona — where we were offered a flight to, and from which we arranged our own onward travel — as our final destination. Malaga was the final destination. It is on the ticket.

I challenged that. The decision was maintained, in terms, as correct “based on our policy”, without engaging with the point.

I challenged it again, this time quoting easyJet's own Notice of Rights back at it. On the third attempt the figure was corrected to €500 in full, and paid.

The expenses decision reimbursed €500.27: meals, and the replacement Barcelona–Malaga flight I booked and paid for myself that evening, including the extra-legroom seats that matched the original booking. It refused the hotel — €198.36 for the night of 6 to 7 September — on the ground that it was a private arrangement booked after the flight disruption took place.

Why that last one cannot be right

Read the refusal again, because it is the most interesting document in the file.

Every expense under Article 9 of Regulation 261/2004 is by definition incurred after the disruption. The right to care is created by the cancellation. A rule that accommodation must be arranged before the event that makes it necessary would empty the provision of all content, which is presumably why no such rule exists.

And the same decision, on the same page, reimbursed a flight I had also booked myself, also after the disruption, also that evening, from the same airport. A reason that did not prevent reimbursement of the flight cannot support refusal of the hotel. The two cannot both stand, and one of them is a cheque that already cleared.

Exhibit — one decision, two outcomes

Reimbursed. Replacement flight, Barcelona to Malaga. Booked by me, after the cancellation, on the evening of 6 September. €490.12.

Refused. Hotel, Barcelona airport. Booked by me, after the cancellation, on the evening of 6 September. €198.36. Reason given: a private arrangement booked after the flight disruption took place.

easyJet's own published policy says that where an overnight stay becomes necessary it will provide a hotel and transport to it, and that where it cannot arrange that itself it will reimburse reasonable expenses against itemised receipts. No accommodation was offered or arranged. Neither the cancellation message nor the cancellation email mentioned the right to care at all. The invoice has been supplied twice.

The pattern

Here is the thing I keep returning to, and it is not the money.

Four decisions. Every one of them wrong. Every one of them wrong in the same direction. Not one arithmetic slip in my favour, not one generous reading, not one instance of easyJet discovering it owed me more than I had asked for.

Errors that are genuinely random do not all point the same way. When every mistake favours the same party, you are not looking at a series of mistakes. You are looking at a setting.

I want to be careful here, because I cannot see inside the process and I am not alleging that anybody set out to cheat me. It does not require that. A system staffed by people working to templates, under time pressure, with a default of declining anything that does not fit the template cleanly, will produce exactly this distribution without a single person intending it. The bias lives in the design, not in the staff. That is in some ways worse, because there is nobody to persuade.

What makes it work is that each individual decision is small enough not to be worth fighting. €125 a head. €198.36. Figures chosen, or arrived at, at precisely the level where a reasonable person decides that their evening is worth more than the dispute.

The silence

I challenged the hotel refusal on 25 September and asked for a reply within fourteen days. That period expired on 9 October. Nothing arrived. Not a holding reply, not an acknowledgement, not a refusal. Nothing.

On 10 October I sent a letter before action. It set out the four points above, asked for payment of €198.36 or confirmation that this was easyJet's final response, and gave fourteen days. It said what would happen otherwise: a complaint to ENAC, the Italian enforcement body designated under Article 16, the flight having left Malpensa; and a claim under the European Small Claims Procedure in the courts of Malaga, as the place of arrival of the contracted carriage, against easyJet Europe Airline GmbH as operating carrier. For €198.36 in accommodation, €60 in additional dog boarding as a consequential loss, interest and costs.

That deadline expired on 24 October. Nothing arrived then either.

So both of those things are now happening. This piece was written in the gaps between ENAC's online complaint form and Form A of the European Small Claims Procedure — the latter a genuinely well-made document, clear about what it needs and why, which I had not expected to be completing over a hotel bill.

The channel that answers

Somewhere in the middle of this I also posted about it on X, tagging easyJet, on the reasonable theory that a public channel sometimes moves faster than a private one.

It worked, briefly. Somebody replied. It was prompt, it was sympathetic, and it asked me for details.

I sent the details. That was the last I heard.

No follow-up. No case reference. No connection to either of the two cases already open, which were in the meantime continuing to go wrong in the usual direction. The reply existed, and then it stopped existing, and the thing it was replying about carried on exactly as before.

Which tells you what that channel is for. It is not a route to resolution. It is a visible demonstration that somebody noticed, performed in front of an audience, and complete the moment the audience has seen it. It exists to make people feel heard. It does not exist to hear them.

The part I could not have invented

The public post did have one concrete consequence, though I doubt it was the intended one.

On the afternoon of the day I sent the letter before action, I received an email from an address at a free webmail provider, signed by an Escalation & Response Supervisor, apologising for the frustration caused by my flight cancellation and the additional hotel expenses, and referring to the €198 I was owed.

It was a phishing attempt, and a reasonably well-aimed one. Somebody knew there was an open dispute and roughly what it was worth, and the only place either of those facts was public was X. Complaining in the open is how you get noticed. It turns out it is also how you get farmed.

So I did the responsible thing and forwarded it to easyJet's published phishing address.

It bounced. The address, I was informed by the mail server, only accepts messages from people in its organization or on its allowed senders list, and your email address isn't specified.

I have read that sentence a number of times. An address published by easyJet so that customers can report fraud committed in its name, configured to accept mail only from easyJet employees. It is not malice. It is a firewall rule that somebody applied to a mailbox without asking what the mailbox was for. But it is a very exact small picture of the whole thing: a process that is correct in its parts and useless at the thing it exists to do.

What it actually cost

Let me total this up honestly, because the outcome is not a bad one.

I recovered €500 in compensation, in full, after three attempts. I recovered €500.27 in expenses. Both are paid and I have no complaint about the amounts. What remains outstanding is €198.36 and a reserved €60.

Against that: five substantive letters, a reading of the regulation, a reading of easyJet's own published policy so that I could quote it back, two document bundles, a calculation of the great-circle distance to establish which compensation band applied, and seven weeks. Call it a working day, spread thin, by somebody who is comfortable with regulatory texts and had the invoices filed.

I am unusually well equipped for this. I do compliance for a living. I have the receipts because I always have the receipts. I was not going to give up over €198 as a matter of temperament, which is a luxury, not a virtue.

Most people are not in that position, and the process does not seem to be designed on the assumption that they are. Everyone who shrugged at €125 a head because the first answer sounded official kept €125 a head less than the law gives them. The regulation is strong. The enforcement of it is almost entirely delegated to the stubbornness of the individual passenger, which is a strange way to run a right.

The point

I did not write any of this down because €198.36 matters. It does not, particularly. I am writing it because I still have not been paid, and because a deadline I set in writing has now passed in silence for the second time. The first was a fortnight that ended on 9 October. The second was a fortnight that ended on 24 October. Both were reasonable, both were explicit about what would follow, and neither produced so much as an acknowledgement.

I wrote it down because of the direction. One wrong decision is an error. Two is bad luck. Four, each of which required me to cite easyJet's own published wording back to it before it was corrected, and each of which failed in the same direction, is a system doing what it does. Nobody has to be acting in bad faith for that to be true, and no individual I dealt with was anything other than polite.

The regulation already works. The documents were never in dispute. What stood between me and the right the law gives me was nothing more than the quantity of effort required to assert it — and that quantity is, I suspect, the only variable anybody is actually managing.

Ends

REF / EZY3771 — filed from Espoo, between an ENAC complaint form and a Form A. Invoice 000000574852 remains unpaid.

Technology · Field notes REF / ARRIVAL

Everything Works Once You Exist

The whole Finnish digital state hangs off a single credential, and that credential is issued to you by a bank. Which raises an obvious question about how you ever get the first one. The answer took a Tuesday.

Espoo — October 2026

In August I wrote that I was moving to a country where the systems work, and said I'd report back once I was standing in it rather than admiring it from a distance. Here is the report. It is shorter than I expected, because the thing I had braced for — the grinding administrative onboarding that every move between countries has previously involved — did not happen.

The official start date was the first of October, which I spent at a conference in Lisbon, this being the industry I work in. I flew to Helsinki on the third, was met at the airport, and was taken straight to the flat in Leppävaara: a commuter-rail suburb built around a station and a shopping centre, which appears to be the standard Finnish pattern and is a good deal more civilised than that description makes it sound.

There was a car waiting for me at the office, and a parking space for it at the flat — numbered, on the upper deck, ramp signposted off the street. Both were simply there. I mention it because it is the first of several things in this account that worked without my having to ring anybody about it, and because I had arrived braced to spend a fortnight on exactly this sort of thing.

Note to self, recorded here so I cannot later claim I wasn't told: tyres, before the first of November. The Finnish winter tyre requirement runs from 1 November to 31 March, and it is written the way I am beginning to expect rules to be written here — not as a date on which summer tyres become illegal, but as an obligation that bites whenever the weather or the road surface actually calls for it. The old fixed December-to-February window was replaced by that condition in 2020. Which is plainly the correct design: November in Espoo and November in Lapland are not the same November, and a calendar has no way of knowing that. It does mean the judgement is mine, and that the police's view of my judgement is the appeals process.

Tyres aside, I arrived that weekend as a person with an address, a job, and no existence whatsoever as far as the Finnish state was concerned. Useful, as it happens. It makes me a test case, and the way a country handles a person who has just appeared tells you more about how it's built than any amount of reading about it does.

The single key

Start with the architecture, because the architecture is the interesting part.

Essentially everything in Finnish public life — tax, residence, social insurance, health records, pensions, prescriptions — sits behind strong electronic identification. Not a password: a legally recognised, regulated identity assertion, good enough to sign a tenancy or file a return. It is the root of trust for the entire digital state.

And the state does not issue it. Your bank does. The online banking credentials that show you your current account are the same credentials that log you into the tax authority and your own medical records. The state set the legal standard, supervised the providers against it, and let institutions that were already running identity checks for their own regulatory reasons do the work once, properly, on everyone's behalf.

Finland did not build a national identity system. It accredited one, and left the enrolment desk inside a commercial bank.

For the nearly 5.7 million people already inside it, this is excellent engineering: no duplicated enrolment, no separate government app that nobody maintains, no second-rate state-built consumer product. It is also, on paper, a textbook circular dependency.

Exhibit — the loop, as written

The services require strong identification. Strong identification comes from your bank credentials. The credentials require an account. The account requires a personal identity code, a registered address and a documented reason to be in the country. And a fair number of the services that establish those would very much like you to log in with strong identification.

Every link is a sensible control, defensible in isolation, imposed by somebody with a legitimate interest in knowing who you are.

This is the point at which most countries I have lived in would hand you six weeks of correspondence and a number to ring.

One Tuesday

On the Tuesday I went to four counters.

The population register, to register my right to be here and be issued the personal identity code that everything else is cut from. The tax office, to sort out tax. The police station, to apply for the national identity card. Then the bank, to open the account.

The bank deserves its own sentence. I left the branch with a working debit card and a working credit card already live in Apple Pay, usable on the walk back to the station. The plastic followed a week later, and turned out to be one card rather than two: a single piece of plastic carrying both numbers, with a setting in the app deciding which of them it presents. That is, on a moment's thought, the obviously correct way to do it, and I have not seen it anywhere else.

By the end of that day I had all of it bar the one thing that cannot be done on day one: the strong identification itself, which needed the identity card I had just applied for. The card was ready by the Friday. My wife flew in at the end of that week and did the identical circuit; she moves over properly in November. A week later I collected both cards, walked into the bank with mine, and had strong authentication issued in ten minutes.

The tax registration arrived exactly seven days after I had sat in the tax office. Not "within six to eight weeks." Seven days.

The loop was real. It just took one morning to walk through it, in the right order, with a passport.

Why it worked

It would be easy to file this under Finnish efficiency and move on, which would miss the design decision underneath it.

The first identity assertion cannot be made digitally. That is not a Finnish limitation, it is a logical one: somewhere at the base of every chain of digital trust, a human being has to look at a document and a face and attest that they match. Every country with a digital identity system has this problem. What distinguishes them is whether they treat that physical step as a legacy embarrassment to be minimised, or as a load-bearing part of the system to be designed and resourced properly.

Here it is plainly the latter. The counters are staffed, unhurried and competent. Each one trusted what the previous one had done rather than re-litigating it. Nobody asked me to prove something that a Finnish authority had already established that morning, and nobody asked me to carry paper between two agencies that could talk to each other. The physical layer isn't what's left over when the digital path fails. It is the on-ramp to it, and it is built like one.

Which is the inversion of nearly everything else I write about here. The recurring subject of these field notes is a capability that exists on paper and stops one step short of the place the citizen actually stands: a secure portal that returns a 404, a button marked "add extra baggage" that adds no baggage, a bank that builds a secure channel and then asks you to email it the password. The defect is almost never the technology. It is the last join, left unfinished, because finishing it was somebody's second priority.

Here, the joins were made. That's the whole difference, and it isn't a technical one.

I had assumed my run was smoothed by circumstance — an employer expecting me, someone meeting the plane — and as far as I can tell that assumption was wrong. The counters show no sign of grading anybody. They were fast, in order, for whoever was in front of them, which is rather the point: an efficiency that depended on who you are wouldn't be efficiency, it would be favour. And the one part I had mentally filed as the slow bit — the right to be in the country at all, which happens upstream of every counter in this post and before you ever land — ran to the same clock. The applications went in at the embassy on a Tuesday, were approved by the following Monday, and the cards arrived a week after that. A fortnight, start to finish, for the step I had braced for.

A note on language

I had been warned about the language and had misunderstood what the warning was for. It isn't conversational — everyone speaks better English than I have any right to expect, and switches without ceremony the moment I start struggling. Nor, so far, has it been administrative. Every service I have needed has worked in English, properly rather than grudgingly, and at no point have I found myself staring at a form I couldn't read.

There is a structural asymmetry underneath it, which I record without having yet tripped over it. Finland has two national languages and English is not one of them. Swedish carries a statutory right to decisions and documents in your own language; English carries a service commitment, which is a different and weaker thing. Whether that distinction ever becomes visible to me is a question for a later post. Two weeks in, it simply works.

Housekeeping

Smaller findings, recorded for completeness. Anything stronger than supermarket beer comes from the state retailer, which now opens on Sundays in some stores and is discussed in tones suggesting this remains recent and faintly astonishing. I have the correct boots, which are studded, and I am reliably informed that the socks matter more than the boots. The national cut brandy is considerably better than its reputation, comes in a one-star and a three-star, and the three-star is the one to drink neat. I will not be taking questions.

Still outstanding: a language with fifteen grammatical cases, which I have started and which has started defeating me. A Labrador, arriving in November, who has been promised snow and is going to be delighted with every person involved in the decision.

And the question I am asked more than any other, by everyone, usually with a slight narrowing of the eyes: are you ready for November?

Yes is the short answer.

More from Espoo.

Ends

REF / ARRIVAL — filed from a flat in Leppävaara, two weeks in.

Technology · Field notes — REF / RELOCATION

Moving to a Country Where the Systems Work

A state monopoly that read its own specification, decided it was wrong, and rewrote it — and the job I’ve taken inside it.

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The blue cross, and a city built around water and winter

Regular readers will have noticed a pattern in these pages. A bank asks you to email it the very documents it warns you never to email. An airline designs a baggage policy whose main function is to be unfindable until you’re standing at the gate. In every case the system performed exactly as specified. That was the complaint.

This entry is different. This one is about a system that looked at its own specification, decided it was wrong, and rewrote it. And about the fact that I’ve taken a job inside it.

The facts of the case

Later this year I’ll be joining Veikkaus — Finland’s national gaming company — as EVP of Technology, leading its technology organisation and joining the executive team. We’re moving to Helsinki: myself, my wife, and a Labrador whose general position on snow is I love it — though he has yet to encounter this much of it, for this long. His views will be entered into the record as the winter progresses.

For those who don’t follow the gambling industry (a defensible life choice), the short version: Veikkaus has held the exclusive right to operate gambling in Finland for decades. In December 2025, Finland’s Parliament passed a new Gambling Act. From 1 July 2027, the most competitive parts of that market — sports betting, online casino — open to licensed competition. Veikkaus keeps the lottery and goes head-to-head with the world’s operators on the rest.

Read that again, because it’s rarer than it sounds. A state monopoly did not cling on, lobby for delay, or quietly nobble the reform. The country examined a system that was functioning exactly as designed, concluded the design no longer served the people it was built for, and legislated a hard deadline to change it — in public, with the incumbent expected to compete on merit. Having spent a fair portion of this blog documenting institutions that fail precisely because they work as designed, I find the inversion genuinely refreshing.

Why take the job

I’ve spent thirty-odd years building and running enterprise technology — platforms that serve millions, through mergers, migrations, and at least one transformation that was advertised as “exciting” and turned out to be accurately described. The honest summary of the trade: the technology is rarely the hard part. The hard part is changing an organisation’s design while the organisation is running at full speed.

Which is exactly the problem on offer here, at national scale, on a legislated clock, inside a company whose stated purpose is not shareholder yield but doing gambling safely — every player identified, harm actively detected, profits to the Finnish state. You can be cynical about corporate purpose statements; I usually am. But a gambling operator that is publicly measured on how well it protects its own customers is at minimum a more interesting engineering brief than one measured on how efficiently it extracts from them. I wanted the hard, honest version of the problem. This is it.

A monopoly that volunteered to compete. In my experience, institutions do not often choose the harder, honest path.

Helsinki in winter — lit windows, a green tram, and snow that means it

Credit where it’s due, meanwhile, to Finland itself, which keeps turning up on the right side of this blog’s ledger without trying: a country where the trains run, the shelters are maintained, the coffee is taken seriously, and a speeding fine scales with your income — a piece of systems design so elegantly incentive-aligned I may frame it.

Housekeeping

First: nothing changes until it changes. I have a role I’m committed to finishing properly — projects to land, a handover to do well, and a team I intend to leave in better shape than I found it. They’ll have my full attention until the last day, because that’s the only way I know how to leave anywhere.

Second: the About page of this blog says I’m a techie on the Costa del Sol. That sentence is now on notice. The road bike is being consulted about studded tyres. The dog has not yet been told that the Baltic is for swimming.

Third: this blog carries on. The subject matter may drift north — expect future field notes on Finnish bureaucracy (early practical experience demonstrates it is very timely and functional), on learning a language with fifteen grammatical cases, and on what -20°C does to a man who has spent the last seven years enjoying the Andalucian climate.

The wider observation

Most institutional failure documented here shares one root: systems optimised for the institution’s convenience and defended long past their sell-by date. What Finland is doing with its gambling market is the opposite move — a system dismantling its own comfortable position because the design no longer fit the purpose. It will be messy, contested, and hard, as honest redesigns always are.

I’ve decided the most useful place to watch it from is the inside, holding a screwdriver.

More from Helsinki.

Ends

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REF / RELOCATION — filed from somewhere over the Bay of Biscay, probably.

Technology · Field notes — REF / HORIZON

Will AI Prevent Another Horizon?

Everyone wants to know whether smarter software would have caught the bug. It is the wrong question. The fatal fault in Horizon was never in the code.

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For a quarter of a century the Post Office held to one position with the conviction of scripture: the computer was right, and the people were wrong. More than nine hundred sub-postmasters were prosecuted on that basis. Lives were ruined, some of them ended. It remains the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British legal history, and it turned on a single, fatal article of faith — that the machine does not lie.

So now, with a far cleverer breed of machine arriving in every workplace, the natural question is whether it would have saved them. Would a modern AI, let loose on the Horizon system, have caught what the courts could not? It is a comforting question, and I understand why people ask it. I think it misses the point so completely that answering it on its own terms does more harm than good.

Horizon was not a software failure

Let me be clear, because this is where most takes go wrong. Yes, Horizon had bugs. Phantom shortfalls that appeared from nowhere. Transactions that reversed themselves. A remote-access capability that let Fujitsu reach into branch accounts and alter figures without the sub-postmaster ever knowing. These were real defects, and they mattered.

But bugs are not remarkable. Every non-trivial system ever shipped has them. I have said before that there are still bugs in Horizon today — they simply haven't been found yet. That is not cynicism; it is how software works. A buggy accounting system is a Tuesday. It is not a national scandal.

What turned defects into a catastrophe was not the defects. It was the decision — taken by people, knowingly, and repeated for years — to trust the machine over the human in front of them, to withhold what was known, and to prosecute anyway. The disaster was a choice. Several thousand of them, in fact, made by individuals with names and salaries and the option, at every turn, to do otherwise.

What AI would genuinely have caught

I want to be fair to the optimistic case, because there is one. Point a modern anomaly-detection model at the Horizon transaction logs and it would have raised its hand almost at once. The same impossible shortfall surfacing across unconnected branches. Balances that reconciled to no human action. Corrections applied with no corresponding entry. This is precisely what such systems are good at: finding the one inconsistency in a mountain of data, tirelessly, at three in the morning, without getting bored or being told to stop looking.

Run a capable model over the codebase and it might well have flagged the remote-access function and the silent edits as exactly the kind of thing that should never exist in a system used as courtroom evidence. So on the narrow technical question — could AI have spotted the problem sooner — the honest answer is yes. It probably could.

But the machines already knew

Here is the part the optimists skate straight past. The discrepancies were never hidden from the computers. They were in the data. Fujitsu's own engineers could see them. The system logged the remote access. The information that would have exonerated hundreds of innocent people sat inside the technology the entire time, available to anyone who cared to look.

Horizon did not fail to detect the problem. People failed to act on what the detection plainly showed them — and, worse, chose to suppress it. The bottleneck was never detection. You cannot fix a refusal to look with a better pair of eyes.

AI will tell you the numbers don't add up. It will not phone the regulator.

AI does not come with a spine

A model will tell you, instantly and without fear, that the figures are impossible. It will not then walk into a manager's office and say we are prosecuting innocent people. It will not refuse to sign the witness statement it knows is misleading. It will not put its own career on the line to stop a prosecution. Those are acts of conscience, and conscience is the single component Horizon lacked — and the one thing no model ships with.

I have sat in a witness box on IT matters. I know what it costs a person to tell an uncomfortable truth under oath, and I know what it costs everyone else when they decline to. None of that arithmetic changes because the software got cleverer. The hard part of Horizon was never the part a computer could do. It was the part where a human being had to be brave, and too few were.

The new danger is worse than the old one

The Post Office's entire institutional defence reduced to four words: the computer is reliable. It rode on a long-standing legal presumption — that a computer was working properly unless you could prove otherwise — which Horizon exposed as dangerous and which has since, belatedly, come under review.

Now consider what we are about to do. We are replacing the merely opaque computer with one that writes its own code, reasons in ways nobody fully audits, and cannot always explain itself even to the people who built it. The "computer says" defence does not weaken in this world. It gets stronger, more impressive, and far harder to challenge from the witness box — because now even the engineers can only shrug. Automation bias was the accelerant last time. We are preparing to pour a great deal more of it onto the fire. When a sub-postmaster in 2032 says "the AI got it wrong," who in that courtroom will be equipped to prove they're right?

Where AI could actually earn its keep

None of this means the technology is useless against the next Horizon. It means we are aiming it at the wrong target. Stop pointing it at the accounting engine and point it at the human layer — the place the failure actually lived.

Tamper-evident, immutable audit logs that no engineer can quietly amend. Anomaly reports routed to somewhere a frightened middle manager cannot intercept them — to an independent board, not up a chain that punishes bad news. Whistleblower channels that surface a pattern after five branches, not nine hundred prosecutions. The value is not a smarter till. It is using the technology to remove the human discretion that let the cover-up breathe — to make looking away harder than facing the thing. That is the Root Cause Analysis instinct: repair the system that produced the failure, not merely the symptom it threw off. AI can help build that scaffolding. It will not choose to build it. We have to.

A year on from the first volume of Sir Wyn Williams's final report, the scale of the human damage is set out in unsparing detail. What is still not settled is the bill for it. Fujitsu has conceded a "moral obligation" to contribute and set aside nothing against it, pending the remainder of the report it says it is waiting on. The total redress is now valued in the region of two billion pounds.

Where it stands, mid-2026 — the suffering catalogued, the contribution still unquantified. The defects we understood years ago. It is the accountability that remains outstanding.

The honest answer

So — will AI prevent another Horizon? It will probably prevent a few. It will catch defects sooner, flag the impossible faster, and spare some people the version of this that begins with a software bug. That is worth having, and I won't pretend otherwise.

But the Horizon that mattered did not begin with a bug. It began with a culture that prized the institution's reputation above the truth, leaders who did not want to be troubled with detail, and a presumption that the machine does not lie. AI touches none of that. If anything, it hands that same culture a more dazzling machine to hide behind, and a better answer to give when someone asks how they could possibly have known.

The next Horizon will not be stopped by a cleverer model. It will be stopped, if it is stopped at all, by someone willing to say "this is wrong" — and by an organisation, for once, willing to listen. We have built remarkable tools for finding the truth. We have never been much good at the part that comes after, where we are supposed to act on it.

Ends