Motoring · Field notes REF / RENKAAT

The Tyre That Cannot Leave the Country

The first thing I was properly drawn into here was a discussion about winter tyres, which produced roughly as many opinions as there were people in the chat. It turned out to be about road maintenance budgets, air quality law and the German border — and then, when I went out one evening with a torch to read my own sidewalls, about the fact that I had never understood what the word ‘winter’ was doing on them.

Espoo — November 2026

Of all the things I expected to have to decide in my first month here, the composition of my tyres was not high on the list. It turned out to be the one that generated the most opinion, the most unsolicited advice, and the only conversation in which a colleague drew a diagram.

It is not one disagreement, either. Studs or studless is merely the headline. Underneath it runs a second argument about whether four-wheel drive changes the answer — whether having it earns you the quieter studless tyre, or simply means you arrive at the icy corner rather faster, drive and grip being different things. Then a third about what you do with the car you have rather than the one you would buy. People hold these positions firmly, they do not sort themselves into two camps, and there are about as many of them as there are people in the chat.

The question is simple to state. Studs, or no studs. Everything else about it is not simple, and I have come to think that is because the question is only superficially about grip. Underneath, it is about who pays to resurface the road, and whose lungs are downwind of it.

Two things, one word

The first obstacle is vocabulary. "Winter tyre" in Finland does not mean what it means in Munich, and the gap between the two is wider than the gap in the debate everyone is actually having.

A nastarengas — a studded tyre — carries metal pins set into the tread. They protrude a fraction of a millimetre and they work by mechanical interference: the stud bites into ice. There is nothing subtle about the mechanism and nothing subtle about the result.

A nastarengas. The pins are what the entire argument is about — what they do to ice, and what they do to the road surface on the way past.

A kitkarengas is the studless alternative, and in English it gets called a friction tyre, which is unhelpfully vague. The ones sold here are Nordic-specification: very soft compound, enormous numbers of sipes, a tread designed to stay pliable at minus twenty-five and to grip by sheer surface contact and by biting edges rather than by puncturing anything. These are the tyres with "Arctic" or "Hakkapeliitta R" or similar on the sidewall.

And then there is a third thing wearing the same label. The central European winter tyre — the one you fit in Austria in October — is also studless, also marked for winter, and is a materially different product designed for a materially different winter: wet, cold, occasionally snowy, almost never glazed. It is a perfectly good tyre in Bavaria. On a Finnish January morning it is out of its depth, and the test figures say so clearly enough that the distinction matters more than the one everyone argues about.

Exhibit — three tyres, two of them indistinguishable

Studded (nastarengas). Metal pins. Bites ice. Legal here November to March, and outside that whenever conditions warrant. Marked under its own regulation, and you can identify it from a metre away by looking at it.

Nordic studless (kitkarengas). Soft compound, heavily siped. Designed for Finland. Carries the 3PMSF snowflake.

Central European winter. Also studless. Also carries the 3PMSF snowflake, the same one. A different tyre for a different winter, and the one you do not want here.

What the numbers actually say

On ice, studs win, and not marginally. Nokian — whose figures these are, and who sell both kinds, so take the framing accordingly — put braking from 50 km/h on ice at roughly 43 metres for a studded tyre against roughly 60 metres for a Nordic studless one. Seventeen metres is about four car lengths. Against a central European winter tyre the gap stretches to nearly eight.

Two qualifications travel with that number, and both matter. The gap is at its widest around zero degrees, when ice is wet and slick and a stud has something to punch through; in hard frost, when ice is dry and grippier, the two converge considerably. And on loose snow, as opposed to ice, the studless tyre is as good or better, because what you want there is tread biting into snow, not metal looking for a hard surface underneath it.

The 2026 test puts a number on how little the choice matters there. Across all fourteen tyres, studded and studless together, braking from 80 km/h on snow covered a spread of 2.3 metres — 50.1 at the front, 52.4 at the back — with the two categories thoroughly interleaved. Acceleration from 5 to 35 km/h covered one tenth of a second. Fourteen tyres, and on snow you could not reliably feel which kind you were on. The magazine puts it in one line: on snow the studs are hardly any help, the studless tyres hold at least as well, and they are often the nicer thing to drive.

The studless tyre also wins the things that are not emergencies. It is quieter, inside the car and outside it. It has lower rolling resistance, which in a heavy electric or hybrid car is not a rounding error but range — Helsinki has run campaigns aimed specifically at electric drivers for exactly this reason. And it gives you latitude on fitting dates, since you are not racing a stud window.

Then there is the finding that reframed the whole thing for me. In Tekniikan Maailma's 2024 comparison — ten studded tyres against nine studless — the worst studded tyre lost the ice braking test to every single studless tyre in the test. Its braking distance ran about nineteen and a half metres longer than the best studded tyre's.

Hold those two figures next to each other. The average gap between the categories is around seventeen metres. The spread within the studded category, in one test, was nearly twenty. Which means the category is not the variable that decides whether you stop. The specific tyre is. "Studs or not" is a worse question than "which one, and is it any good", and I had been asking the worse one for three weeks.

The same magazine's 2026 comparison came out differently on that one point, and it would be dishonest not to say so. There, across fourteen tyres, every studded tyre out-braked every studless tyre on ice; the categories did not overlap at all. But the spreads tell the same story. The studded tyres ran from 39.2 to 45.2 metres and the studless from 47.1 to 55.9, which means the distance between the best and the worst studless tyre — nearly nine metres — is more than four times the distance between the categories at the point where they meet. Choosing the right tyre is worth considerably more than choosing the right kind of tyre. That holds in both tests, and it is the part I would bet on.

Why studs are restricted

Here is the part that surprised me most, and it is the hinge of the whole piece.

Almost nowhere in Europe are studs restricted because they are dangerous. They are restricted because they are abrasive. A stud is a small chisel, and a few hundred thousand of them passing over the same asphalt every day turn the road surface into airborne mineral dust and a resurfacing bill.

There is a number for it. Norway's national encyclopedia puts the wear from one car on studs at somewhere between 5 and 20 grams of asphalt dust per kilometre driven. Multiply that by a commute, by a season, by a city.

Studs are banned almost nowhere for being unsafe. They are banned for being abrasive. Every rule you meet is a road maintenance budget, or an air quality limit, wearing traffic law as a costume.

The Helsinki region says this out loud. HSY, the regional environmental authority, names studded tyres as the main source of street dust in the metropolitan area — not just in the spring dust season everyone here complains about, but on dry winter days too. In October 2026 Helsinki, Espoo, Vantaa and Kauniainen went out jointly to push the share of studless tyres up from roughly 40 per cent of the regional fleet, with leaflets at inspection stations and tyre shops, and advertising on screens, radio and in cinemas. Espoo, where I live, was already at about 47 per cent last season. Helsinki's stated ambition is 70 per cent by the start of the next decade.

And note how carefully the cities phrase the safety question. Their line is that driving style and tyre condition matter more to road safety than which of the two types you fitted. That is a defensible claim — the Tekniikan Maailma spread supports it — and it is also precisely the claim a city needs to be true in order to campaign on air quality without being accused of trading lives for dust.

There is already one piece of hard restriction. A 900-metre stretch of Lönnrotinkatu, in central Helsinki, has been closed to studded tyres since a trial began in 2022, and from November 2025 the restriction tightened: studs only if you are reaching a courtyard or a parking garage on the street. Not a cobbled lane, as I had assumed when I first heard about it — an ordinary asphalt city street, and a main route down to the West Harbour, picked because of what the air above it measures. The stricter phase runs to 2028.

Why they don't travel

All of which I could live with, because I live in a city that ploughs and grits competently and whose winter is mostly packed snow rather than polished ice. The thing that actually decided it was a drive.

We have a house in the Alps. Which means that at some point in the winter, the car drives south. And on that drive, studs are not a trade-off. They are simply illegal.

Germany has banned studded tyres since 1975. There is one geographic exception, the Kleines Deutsches Eck around Bad Reichenhall, where a short stretch of German road is the only sensible way between two bits of Austria, and emergency vehicles are exempt. That is it. The prohibition attaches to the road rather than to the number plate, so being Finnish does not help you, and Germany is unavoidably in the way of everywhere I want to go. Any route from Helsinki to the Alps — by ferry to Travemünde, or round through Sweden and Denmark — ends up on German asphalt.

France, where I would be finishing the drive, does permit them, and the terms are a good illustration of how grudging that permission is. The governing text is still an arrêté from July 1985. Studs are allowed from the Saturday before 11 November to the last Sunday in March, which is a stranger pair of dates than anything in Finnish law and can be moved by prefectoral decision if the weather demands it. The speed limit is 90 km/h — on motorways included. And you must carry a 15-centimetre disc on the lower left of the rear bodywork, removable, so that it is only showing while the studs are actually on.

Exhibit — the same tyre, five countries

Finland. Legal 1 November to 31 March, and outside it whenever conditions require. Studless minimum tread 3.0 mm, and since December 2024 a plain M+S marking no longer counts — it needs the 3PMSF snowflake, or studs.

Germany. Banned since 1975, with one small border exception.

France. Studs legal from the Saturday before 11 November to the last Sunday in March. 90 km/h maximum, motorways included. 15 cm disc, rear lower left. Separately, in the designated mountain communes: 3PMSF on all four wheels or chains in the boot, 1 November to 31 March, €135 and possible immobilisation if not.

Norway. Legal nationally — 1 November to the first Sunday after Easter Monday, and 16 October to 30 April in the three northernmost counties. But individual cities charge for it. In Oslo this winter: NOK 35 a day, NOK 1,400 for the season, and NOK 750 if you drive on studs without having paid.

Sweden. Studs legal nationally from 1 October to 15 April — the earliest opening in this list — and outside it whenever winter road conditions exist or are expected. Winter tyres compulsory 1 December to 31 March in those conditions, minimum tread 3 mm, same as Finland. And then Stockholm bans studs outright on named central streets.

Those last two rows are the ones to read twice, because the contradiction inside each of them is the pattern rather than an oddity. Norway's fee is not a national road rule at all: it rests on a royal decree of 1999, a city needs the national roads administration's approval to levy one, and the money goes to the municipality that did — Oslo, Bergen, Trondheim, Stavanger and Kristiansand so far. The country says yes; the cities send an invoice. Sweden does the same thing with a blunter instrument. Stockholm closes streets: Fleminggatan entire, parts of Hornsgatan, a stretch of Kungsgatan, with Sveavägen, Birger Jarlsgatan, Vasagatan and Torsgatan to follow in October 2027. Helsinki's Lönnrotinkatu is the same instrument, one street earlier in its life.

Three countries, three mechanisms, one direction. The nation permits, because the nation is thinking about a rural road in February. The city restricts, because the city is thinking about the air on a street in March. Nobody is arguing about whether the tyre stops.

The option is shrinking. So is the ground under it.

I had been telling people the studded option was narrowing. Then I talked myself out of it, on the reasoning that nobody had stopped making the things and the good ones were still very good. Then I read the winter tyre comparison in Tekniikan Maailma — the magazine Finns actually buy for this — and found that my first instinct had been right and my correction of it wrong.

The ground is narrowing, and I will come back to that. But the supply is narrowing too, and by a duller and more decisive mechanism than any city ordinance.

Studded tyres have carried their own road wear requirement for years: a test conducted by driving, which measures how much of the road surface the tyre takes away with it. That requirement is now being tightened. The purpose is stated without embarrassment, and it is not winter safety.

Viranomaisen tavoitteena on vähentää teiden kulumista ja haitallisen katupölyn muodostumista. — The authority's objective is to reduce wear on the roads and the formation of harmful street dust.

Which leaves a manufacturer holding an existing model with a plain commercial choice, and the magazine states it plainly: seek a fresh type approval for the current product against the stricter criteria, or wind the model down and stop selling it once old stock has cleared.

At the time of that test three manufacturers had cleared the stricter A+ grade and met the harder road wear limits — Goodyear, Michelin and Nokian. Everybody else is in the transition, working out whether their current product is worth re-approving. Continental has already launched a successor to the IceContact 3 which was not yet on sale when the test ran, and goes on selling the old one meanwhile. The magazine's verdict on the rest is that those riding on old models are beginning to run out of time.

So the shelf does not empty dramatically. It thins, one model at a time, as each manufacturer does the arithmetic on a tyre designed against a limit that no longer applies. That is slower than a ban and much harder to argue with, because nobody has to defend it at a council meeting. There is no campaign to join and no vote to lose. There is a threshold, and a date, and a product manager with a spreadsheet.

And the ground is narrowing at the same time, in the way I have already set out: Lönnrotinkatu tightening to 2028, Stockholm expanding in 2027, Oslo pricing them by the day, Helsinki campaigning for 70 per cent studless, all of it anchored to air quality limits rather than to anyone's opinion about winter driving. The 3PMSF requirement that arrived in December 2024 points the same way — it raised the floor under the studless tyre, which makes the studless tyre an easier thing for a regulator to insist on.

Both ends are moving, they are moving towards each other, and they are moving for the same reason. Street dust does not get less carcinogenic.

The marking is not the tyre

I went out one evening with a torch to read my own sidewalls, which is not a thing I had ever done in my life. The French car — a Subaru XV, which is the one that lives at the house in the Alps — wears a Yokohama BluEarth Winter V905 in 225/60 R17. It carries the snowflake, so it is legal everywhere I take it. Its single weakest measured attribute, across its whole test history, is ice.

I had been in this country six weeks, reading the chat and drafting this, and it had not once occurred to me that “winter tyre” names two different products.

Which brings up the question I should have asked at the start and only asked when somebody put it to me directly: if I fit Nordic studless tyres in Espoo, am I legal in France?

Yes. And for a faintly uncomfortable reason. The French mountain rules want the 3PMSF snowflake on all four corners, and a Nordic tyre carries it — Nokian's Hakkapeliitta R5 lists 3PMSF against every size on its own data sheet. So the requirement is met, by a tyre built for a different continent, because the marking certifies a snow test rather than a winter. The symbol that was supposed to tell the winter tyres apart is the one thing the two studless ones have in common.

And I should correct myself here, because I had this wrong until I went looking. The snowflake does not unite all three. A studded tyre carries a mark of its own: under UN Regulation 164, adopted at the end of 2022, it gets the snowflake combined with a Cyrillic Ш — sha, for the Russian word for studs — and the word STUDDED moulded into the sidewall at least four millimetres high. Before that regulation existed, studded tyres were outside the snow grip rules altogether and were not permitted to carry the snowflake at all.

Sit with the shape of that for a second. The regulator built a distinct marking for the one winter tyre you can identify from a metre away, by looking at it, because it has metal spikes in it — and which every country in Europe already regulates by name, by date and in Germany's case by prohibition. The two that are genuinely indistinguishable to a buyer, that sit side by side in the same rack at the same shop, and that are separated by twelve points on a twenty point ice scale, were given one symbol between them.

Which is a shame, because France has just finished making that symbol load-bearing. Until November 2024 the mountain rules accepted a tyre marked M+S, a designation a manufacturer may essentially award itself. From 1 November 2024 that tolerance ended and only 3PMSF counts — awarded on a standardised snow traction test rather than on an opinion. It did not outlaw all-season tyres, as I had assumed when I first heard about it: an all-season carrying 3PMSF is still perfectly legal in the Alps. What it outlawed was the unverified claim.

And here is the detail that made me put my coffee down. Finland made exactly the same change, for exactly the same reason, five weeks later — M+S alone stopped being a winter tyre here on 1 December 2024. Two countries that agree on almost nothing else about winter rubber, one of which bans the other's preferred tyre from its capital's streets, converged within a month on the same answer. Not on which tyre. On which test.

So it is worth knowing what the test is. Under UN Regulation 117, the snowflake is awarded on a prepared snow surface: roughly three centimetres of hard-packed base with two centimetres of medium-packed snow on top, air temperature between minus two and minus fifteen. A passenger car tyre has to brake at least seven per cent better than a standard reference tyre, or out-pull it by ten per cent from standstill. Clear the bar, get the snowflake.

Now read that for what is absent. There is no ice in it. The 3PMSF test does not assess ice at all — and ice, not snow, is what puts you into the ditch on the Kehä I slip road in March. Every winter tyre law in Europe, France's and Finland's alike, is anchored to a tested measure of the surface that is not the problem.

You can see the size of that hole in a single comparison. Teknikens Värld ran eighteen tyres through one test this year — studded, Nordic studless and central European together, marked on the same scale. On ice braking, out of twenty, the Nordic tyres scored twelve to fourteen. The central European tyres scored two to four.

Exhibit — two winter tyres, one snowflake

Condition	Nordic studless	Central European
Ice braking	12–14 / 20	2–4 / 20
Packed snow	Clearly stronger	Clearly weaker
Loose snow	Strong	Competent
Cold wet, 0–7°C	Good; varies by model	Best in class, full marks
Warm wet, above 7°C	Poor	What they are built for
Dry, cold	Adequate	Strong
Dry, warm and fast	Vague	Strong
Aquaplaning	Their weakest area	Best in the field
Wear in warm weather	Poor	Markedly better
Speed index offered	Mostly R / T, some H — 170–210	H / V / W — 210–270
3PMSF snowflake on the sidewall	Yes — the identical mark	Yes — the identical mark
Ice mark on the label	Yes	No

Ice and snow from Teknikens Värld 2026, eighteen tyres, marked out of 20. Wet and dry are marked out of 10 in the same test, so winter surfaces carry twice the weight — the right weighting for Sweden, the wrong one for Savoie. The remaining rows are the consistent direction across that test and Vi Bilägare's.

Every tyre in both of those columns carries the snowflake. And it is worth being exact about this, because I had assumed otherwise: it is the same snowflake. Not a Nordic grade of it, not a variant with an extra letter, not a higher tier that the Finnish tyre earns and the German one does not. One symbol, one test, one legal meaning, moulded identically into a tyre that scores fourteen on ice and a tyre that scores two. Every one of them is legal everywhere the snowflake is required. One column stops on ice and the other, in the magazine's own words, does not.

And if you want the comparison with the manufacturer held constant, Pirelli will sell you both: the Ice Friction for the Nordic market, the P Zero Winter 2 for the central European one. Same company, same symbol, nine points apart on one scale, the gap concentrated on ice. Nobody is cutting corners. They are two different products answering two different questions, and the law can only see the thing they have in common.

Which would be a merely interesting observation, except that the right measurement already exists. There is a separate ice grip symbol — a small stalagmite pictogram — awarded on an ISO 19447 ice test against an index of 1.18, available only to passenger car tyres, and in practice carried almost exclusively by Nordic studless tyres. It has been printable on the EU tyre label since May 2021, and it is precisely the mark that would separate my tyre from an identically-labelled Bavarian one at a glance. Look for it on the label and the data sheet rather than on the rubber, though. When the European tyre industry's own technical body proposed adding a dedicated ice pictogram to UN Regulation 117, in 2021, it observed that ice tyres were not defined in that regulation at all — only implicitly folded in with the 3PMSF snow tyres. Nokian also states that studded tyres are excluded from the label marking, which if right means the best ice tyre in the country is not allowed to carry the ice symbol.

Two mountains. The one on the left is mandatory and is a snow test. The one on the right is optional, is the ice test, and is the one that would actually tell you what you are buying.

And no winter tyre law I can find references it. Not France's, not Finland's. The measurement that separates the two tyres nobody can tell apart is tested, standardised, and already printed on the label — and no regulation anywhere asks to see it.

It is a real standard, too, which is the part I checked twice before believing. ISO 19447, Passenger car tyres — method for measuring ice grip performance: a published method with a hard threshold, an ice grip index of 1.18 measured on ice braking against a reference tyre. Not a badge a marketing department awarded itself.

Its legal footing is the lovely bit. Regulation (EU) 2020/740 permits the pictogram, but does not name the standard in its operative text — ISO 19447 turns up in recital 14, in the preamble. The European Commission's own guidance note on the question is titled, in substance, the Regulation does not indicate a specific standard; it answers by pointing at the recital, and signs off by noting that the Commission cannot give a legally binding interpretation of EU law in any case. Display is optional. It covers passenger cars only, because the ISO method covers nothing else. Verification is market surveillance checking a tyre against the figure its own supplier declared.

So: a genuine standard that has been given the legal standing of a good idea. Which is the most European sentence I have written since I arrived, and I did not have to try.

The Finnish trade view of it is the same, which was reassuring in the way that being told you are not imagining something is reassuring. Tekniikan Maailma describes the ice symbol as expressly not a mandatory approval criterion: its purpose, it says, is to give the buyer extra information and to tell a Nordic winter tyre apart from a central European studless one. Which is precisely the job the snowflake is failing to do. Every one of the six studless tyres in its 2026 comparison carried the ice mark.

Two things follow from that, and neither is in the regulations. The first is a sticker. Nordic studless tyres are commonly rated R or T — 170 or 190 km/h — where a central European winter tyre is routinely H or V, 210 or 240. Commonly, though, is not always: of the six studless tyres in the 2026 Finnish test, three were T, one was R and two were H. So it is a thing to read off the sidewall rather than assume from the category. The eight studded tyres in the same test were, without exception, T. German law does permit a winter tyre rated below the car's design top speed, but only if the driver has been told so by a sticker in their field of view or an indicator on the display, and only if the lower figure is actually observed. On a derestricted stretch of Autobahn that is not a formality.

The second is physics, and it is the bigger one. Sixteen hundred kilometres of motorway at five or ten degrees above freezing, a good deal of it wet, is precisely where a soft Nordic compound is at its worst: longest braking, fastest wear, and in the R5's case the lowest aquaplaning resistance in its own test group. The tyre that is best in Espoo is close to the tyre I would least want under me in Bavarian rain.

So: Arctic, with chains in the boot

Studless Nordic tyres, then, and a set of chains that live in the boot and hopefully never come out.

The reasoning, stated plainly. So far the car has spent almost all of its winter inside the Helsinki region, on roads maintained to a standard I had not previously believed was achievable, where the surface is far more often packed snow than glazed ice, and where a good studless tyre gives up very little.

I am conscious that “so far” is carrying weight in that sentence. At some point this car is going north — onto roads that are not Helsinki roads, are not ploughed on Helsinki's schedule, and in places are not really surfaced in the sense a Helsinki road is surfaced. The chains will come out of the boot and be used in earnest.

And there is a nearer case than that one, which I had not thought about properly until somebody pointed it out. It can snow hard enough here, fast enough, that the problem is not the road at all. It is the first two hundred metres of it: getting off the spot and far enough out to reach something that has been ploughed. Chains solve that. So, without any kneeling in the snow, do studs — which is one of the reasons several of my colleagues simply run them and have never agonised over the decision the way I have been agonising over it in print.

So let me set the compromise down plainly rather than leave it implied. A studded tyre would handle the northern trip better than chains will, and would handle the bad morning in Espoo without my getting out of the car. What I have chosen is excellent for the ninety per cent, legal for the drive south, and merely adequate — with manual intervention, in the cold, at the roadside — for the two cases where the locally optimal answer would just have worked.

One practical note I nearly got wrong, and worth checking before you buy: not every car has the clearance for chains, and the handbook will tell you which size, if any, the manufacturer approves. Mine, which I finally read properly rather than assuming, permits them on the front axle only — that is the driven axle, so it follows — and specifies a maximum chain height of 13.4 millimetres, the same figure on both the eighteen and the twenty inch wheels. I had not previously known that chain height was a dimension a car could hold an opinion about. Where chains will not fit, textile snow socks are the alternative, and the position is clearer than I first thought — there is a European standard, EN 16662-1, and most of the continent has simply accepted it.

Exhibit — does a textile sleeve count as a chain?

France. Accepted, including for the mountain rules.

Germany. Accepted in place of chains.

Italy. Accepted, provided they are homologated to UNI EN 16662-1:2020.

Switzerland. Accepted since 1 December 2020, the first such approvals granted there.

Austria. Not accepted. The relevant ÖNORM was never written into Austrian traffic law, so where a sign demands chains, Austria means chains.

Finland, Sweden, Norway. The question does not really arise. Chains and socks are permitted — Sweden names both, for any vehicle, whenever conditions warrant — but a passenger car is never obliged to carry either. Norway's chain requirement starts at 3,500 kg; Finland and Sweden ask nothing of cars at all.

And wherever they are accepted, the chain rules come with them: 50 km/h, on both wheels of a driven axle.

One honest qualification. Those are secondary sources rather than five statutes read end to end, and the German motoring club's own guidance on the Schneeketten vorgeschrieben sign does not address textiles either way. But the sources agree with each other and with the manufacturer's own compliance table, including on Austria, where that table is conceding something against its own interest. Austria is the one to remember.

And that last row is the one that reframed the thing for me. The chain mandate is an Alpine instrument. It exists where a road climbs steeply enough, often enough, that rubber alone will not do, and it is enforced with a sign and a fine. North of the Baltic no such sign exists for a car, in any of the three countries, because the whole system assumes the tyre is doing the job and has been built on that assumption for decades.

So the chains going into the boot for the northern trip are not compliance equipment at all. No one will stop me for lacking them. I will simply be stuck. In the Alps the law makes you carry them; in Finland the road just quietly makes you want to.

And then there is the speed sticker, which I had filed as the most absurd item on the whole list until I went and read the rule, at which point it turned out to be both smaller and more sensible than I had been making it. StVZO §36(5): if the winter tyres are rated below the car's registered top speed, that lower figure has to be shown somewhere in the driver's field of view — a sticker, a plate, or a permanent display on the dashboard all qualify — and it then has to be observed. A missing sticker is a five euro matter. Being caught above the tyre's rating is twenty-five.

Which means the honest version is not “Germany makes you buy a sticker”. It is that you can engineer the problem out at the point of purchase. Nordic studless tyres commonly come in R and T — 170 and 190 km/h — and plenty of the cars they get fitted to sit between the two. Buy the T and the question never arises, which is cheaper than a sticker and very much cheaper than discovering on a derestricted stretch of the A7 that your tyres ran out twenty kilometres an hour ago.

If I lived outside the city — on an unlit rural road, on the coast where the thaw-freeze cycle polishes everything to glass, driving at six in the morning before anything has been gritted — I would fit studs without a second thought and take the German problem as the price of it. That is more or less what Nokian's own guidance says, and it is right. The decision is not about which tyre is better. It is about which winter you actually have.

The point

What I did not expect was how much of this would turn out to be about something other than tyres.

Finland has, by a reasonable margin, the best answer in Europe to the problem of driving on ice. It has had it for decades, it tests it rigorously every autumn in a magazine people actually read, and it is almost entirely unexportable — because the answer's cost falls on road surfaces and on air, and those costs are priced differently in a country with 1,300 kilometres of frozen rural road than in one with a city centre under an EU air quality limit.

So the Finnish-optimal choice is illegal on the one long drive I most want to make, and the compromise I have arrived at is not the best tyre for Finland, nor the best tyre for the Alps, nor even the best tyre for the sixteen hundred kilometres in between. It is the best tyre that is permitted to do all three. Which is roughly what happens to any locally optimal answer the moment it has to cross a border.

Which is where the two halves of this meet, and it took me a month to notice they were the same half. The restrictions are not about safety — studs are curtailed for abrasion, for dust, for the resurfacing bill. And the permissions are not about safety either — the snowflake that licenses a tyre for the Alps and for Espoo alike is a snow test that never looks at ice. There is nothing in European winter tyre law, at either end, that is really about whether you stop.

That is not a complaint about Europe. It is the ordinary condition of any regulated thing: getting a number into law is a wholly different problem from getting the number right, and the first problem is the one that gets solved. The good test of the wrong surface is in the statute with €135 and an immobilised car behind it. The right test sits in a recital and on a label, free to read, cited by nobody.

I have been in the country six weeks, and the chat has produced about as many opinions on this as it has people in it.

Sources — the one worth buying

The Finnish figures and the type approval material here come from the winter tyre comparison in Tekniikan Maailma 18/2026: fourteen tyres in 205/55 R16, eight studded and six studless, on a VW Golf, tested by Jukka Antila with UTAC Automotive Testing Finland and Aimo Niemi. It is in Finnish, it is not online for free, and it is better than anything I found in English. If you are buying winter tyres in this country, buy the issue first.

Ends

REF / RENKAAT — filed from Espoo, with a set of chains still in their box.

Culture · Field notes REF / NCC-1701-D

Time Is a Companion

Sir Patrick Stewart died on 28 October, aged 86. He was a Royal Shakespeare Company actor for sixteen years before he was a starship captain, and he took the captain’s job expecting it to be cancelled. It ran, in one form or another, for thirty-nine years. The franchise he carried has outlived him by rather less than it looks.

Espoo — November 2026

The line everyone has been posting this week is from Generations, and it is worth having in full, because the full version is better than the fragment:

Someone once told me that time was a predator that stalked us all our lives. But I rather believe that time is a companion who goes with us on the journey, and reminds us to cherish every moment, because they’ll never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we’ve lived.

He is talking to Riker on the wreck of the saucer section, having just buried a man who spent the entire film trying to get back into a place where time does not pass at all. It is the closest the franchise ever came to stating its own thesis out loud, and it works because of who is saying it — a man who could make exposition sound like it had been thought about.

His family said he died after a short time living with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia with Lewy bodies. The second of those is the one that killed Robin Williams, and in his case it was only identified after his death; his widow wrote afterwards about how little understood it had been while he was alive. It is the second most common degenerative dementia after Alzheimer’s, and most people have still never heard of it.

Sixteen years before the bridge

This is the part that gets flattened in the headlines. Stewart was born in Mirfield in the West Riding in 1940 and joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1966, and he stayed there until 1982. Sixteen years. He was Snout in Peter Brook’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, the production that changed what English Shakespeare looked like. He won an Olivier for Antony and Cleopatra in 1979, and another nearly thirty years later for playing Claudius opposite David Tennant’s Hamlet, with a Tony nomination attached to it. He did Waiting for Godot with Ian McKellen. He did A Christmas Carol alone on a stage, all the parts, for years.

Claudius, 1980 — the BBC Television Shakespeare Hamlet, with Derek Jacobi in the title role. Stewart was fourteen years into his time at the Royal Shakespeare Company. He played the same part again in 2008, opposite David Tennant, and won his second Olivier for it. PBS publicity photograph. Public domain.

He was never nominated for an Academy Award. Not once, in sixty years. He has four Emmy nominations, three Golden Globes, three from the Screen Actors Guild, and won none of them. What he did win was two Oliviers, a Drama Desk, and — this is my favourite line in his record — a Grammy, for narrating Peter and the Wolf.

The casting story is almost too neat. Robert Justman saw him give a literary reading at UCLA and decided that was the captain. Stewart signed a standard six-year contract and by his own account expected the thing to fail inside a season, which is why he reportedly did not bother moving his furniture over. He was forty-seven, bald, English, and classically trained, in a part written for an American adventurer. Every single one of those was supposed to be a problem.

The order I found them in

I started thinking about writing this in the gym on Saturday morning. The Enterprise theme came up on my playlist, and somewhere in the next few minutes I worked out something I had never quite put into words: of all the things I have followed over the years, this is the one that has taken up the most of my life. Not necessarily the best. The biggest.

The theme in question is one I would put second in the whole franchise, behind Jerry Goldsmith’s theme for First Contact. It is the odd one out — a vocal pop song where everything else is orchestral — and plenty of people never forgave it for that. I think they were wrong. It is a song about people who have not got anywhere yet, sung by someone insisting that they will, which sums up humanity rather better than any amount of brass.

I came to it backwards, like most people my age. The Original Series first, in repeats, already old when I saw it. Then The Next Generation as it aired, which is the one I actually grew up with and the one that formed whatever I think good television is.

Deep Space Nine I did not like at first and now rate higher than almost all of it — it is a series about occupation, collaboration and a war that cannot be won cleanly, hiding inside a show about a space station. Voyager was the same shape of experience: slow to start, better than I gave it credit for. Enterprise was cut off at four seasons in 2005, just as it had worked out what it was for. And Picard, whatever you think of its first two seasons, used its third to give the Next Generation crew the ending the films never quite managed.

Discovery belongs in that list too, and followed the same pattern: I did not get on with the first season and ended up glad I had stayed with it. What soured it was not the programme. Paramount cancelled it in March 2023 and did not tell the cast and crew until they had finished shooting the fifth season, so the ending they had already filmed was not an ending at all. The studio then paid for three extra days of filming to bolt a conclusion on. That is a better outcome than most get. It is still a series being told how it finishes by an accountant.

This is the recurring Star Trek theme, and Enterprise is the worst case of it by a distance. Its final episode is not about its own crew. It is framed as a holodeck recreation being run by Riker and Troi, characters from a series that had ended eleven years earlier, and it kills Trip Tucker off in a way the story does not need. Jolene Blalock called it appalling before it had even aired. Brannon Braga, who wrote it, has since said the Tucker death “wasn’t a great idea” and that making the finale about The Next Generation is his biggest regret. Four years of work, and the cast were handed somebody else’s ending.

Strange New Worlds is the one that surprised me. It is the first of them in years that feels like the programme I started with — episodic, curious, a ship going out to look at something and coming home again — and watching it put me straight back in front of those Original Series repeats. Which makes six episodes and out a particularly irritating way for it to finish.

Not everything landed. Starfleet Academy never grew on me the way the others eventually did, and the animated ones never have either. I am prepared to accept that may be me rather than them — Lower Decks has people who love it the way I love Deep Space Nine — but I could not get there.

The films divide neatly. The Wrath of Khan is one of the best films anyone has made out of a television series, full stop. The Next Generation films were good without being that, and Generations did something genuinely clever: it handed the franchise from one cast to another inside a story about a man refusing to accept that his time had ended. The Kelvin films were better than people now admit.

What is actually left

Here is the thing I did not fully register until I went and counted. Every single Star Trek series is finished or finishing.

Star Trek on television, as of 31 October 2026

Series	Ended	How
Picard	April 2023	Planned, after three seasons
Prodigy	2023–25	Cancelled, rescued by Netflix, licence then lapsed
Discovery	May 2024	Cancelled during post-production on season five
Lower Decks	December 2024	Ended at five seasons; creator had two more planned
Starfleet Academy	March 2027	Second season confirmed as its last, two months after the first aired
Strange New Worlds	2027	Fifth season cut to six episodes and made the final one

Sixteen unreleased episodes remain — ten of Starfleet Academy, six of Strange New Worlds. Nothing is commissioned behind them.

The Strange New Worlds ending deserves its nuance, because it is being reported two different ways. Paramount originally meant to stop it after four seasons on cost grounds, with the merger pending. The showrunners asked for six more episodes so they could land the series into The Original Series properly rather than stop mid-sentence the way Discovery did, and got them. So it was presented in June 2025 as a planned five-season arc, and the people involved thanked the studio for it. That is a more graceful exit than Enterprise got. It is still a show being ended because of a spreadsheet.

The films are in no better shape. The Kelvin cast was formally let go in November 2025, and David Ellison has told investors the next film will not be set in that universe. Section 31, the 2025 streaming film, sits at twenty-three per cent on Rotten Tomatoes, which makes it the worst-reviewed thing in the entire franchise, and it collected five Razzie nominations including Worst Picture. There is one film in development, from Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, confirmed still alive at CinemaCon in April. New cast, new story, no connection to anything. No date. No cast announced. The “origin story” film announced in 2024 for the sixtieth anniversary has simply stopped being mentioned by anybody.

San Diego, July 2019, launching Star Trek: Picard — seventeen years after he had last played the part. Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0.

The door Picard left open

The Picard finale was not a full stop. It rechristens the Titan as the Enterprise-G, puts Seven of Nine in the centre seat with Raffi beside her, leaves Jack Crusher aboard, and has Q turn up to tell him his trial is only beginning. That is not an ending. That is a pilot.

Terry Matalas pitched it as Star Trek: Legacy and spent two years saying so in public. Paramount never ordered it. By this February the reporting was blunt: it failed to gain traction, there is no development, it is not happening. Matalas is running a Marvel series now. The premise survives as an IDW comic, which began in September — Seven of Nine, commanding the Enterprise-G, on paper.

So a studio was handed a finished pilot by its most warmly received Star Trek in twenty years, with the cast available and the audience asking for it, and did nothing with it for three and a half years. I find that harder to explain than any of the cancellations.

The ownership has changed twice in the meantime. Skydance completed its merger with Paramount Global in August 2025. Thirteen months later, on 6 October this year, that company closed its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery and renamed itself Skydance outright. Star Trek has spent the whole of its sixtieth-anniversary year inside a company that was busy being bought and then busy buying. No public plan for the franchise has been stated by anyone who actually owns it. The closest thing to an official read came from Trevor Roth of Roddenberry Entertainment, who is rights-adjacent rather than a studio spokesman, and who said in Rome ten days ago that Star Trek is “at a bit of a crossroads”.

Crossroads is generous. Sixty years in, the franchise whose entire premise is a sentence about going somewhere has nothing in production and nowhere announced to go.

The band outside the palace

Elizabeth II knighted him in 2010, in the New Year Honours, for services to drama; the investiture was at Buckingham Palace that June. This week the Band of the Grenadier Guards played the Star Trek theme at the Changing of the Guard, outside the same building. I have watched the clip more times than I would like to admit. There is something very particular about a British state ceremony, performed to the minute for two hundred years, stopping to play the theme tune of an American science-fiction programme because one of its captains came from Mirfield.

It was not the only loss. Walter Koenig, Chekov in The Original Series, died on 26 October, two days before Stewart, aged ninety. The franchise lost two of its captains’ crews inside one week of its anniversary month.

Stewart’s last screen performance, as Charles Xavier, is still to come in December.

A different kind of era ending

When Gorbachev died in 2022 I wrote a piece here called End of an Era, about growing up with the Cold War in the background and going to see Berlin while it was still cut in half. This feels like one of those, and it does not feel like it for the same reason at all.

Gorbachev’s era had finished long before he did. He outlived his own settlement by three decades and had to watch most of it come apart while he was still in the room. The man was the last thing left of it.

This is the other way round. The man went first, and the thing he made is still standing — still owned, still licensed, still being sold back to us as a sixtieth anniversary. It has not been overtaken by history or disproved by events. It has simply been left on a shelf by people who have not worked out what they want to do with it. One ending came from the world changing faster than anyone could hold on to. This one comes from nobody deciding anything.

What he left behind

He took a job he expected to lose and turned a part written as a template into the most quoted authority figure in modern television — a man whose default response to a crisis was to ask the room what it thought, and who was allowed to be wrong in front of his own crew. For a generation of people who were eighteen when they first saw him, that was the model of how a competent adult behaves under pressure, and a great many of us have been quietly running on it ever since.

I am realistic about the rest of it. I am not going to see time travel, or a transporter, or anything moving faster than light. Those were always the furniture rather than the point, and the point was a room full of competent people arguing their way to a decision. But if any of it does arrive, long after I am gone, I hope whoever gets there keeps the habit of naming ships after people. Roll on the USS Picard.

And if anyone at Skydance is looking for the right way to mark his death, it is not a tribute reel. The series that was pitched and never ordered — Seven of Nine in the centre seat of the Enterprise-G, the ship his own finale launched — is sitting there finished, waiting for somebody to say yes. Making it would be a better memorial than anything any of us can write this week.

What we leave behind is not as important as how we have lived. He gets to have that both ways.

Postscript

All thirteen Star Trek feature films went up free on Pluto TV on 1 November, framed explicitly as a tribute to Stewart and as part of the sixtieth-anniversary run. No end date has been given.

Ends

REF / NCC-1701-D — written in Espoo, for someone from Mirfield.

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.