About Very Finnish Problems

Moi! I'm Joel Willans, a Brit, who met a Finnish woman in a club in London, fell for her and was brought back to her homeland on the firm understanding that we'd stay for one year. That was over twenty years ago. She's now my wife and I'm still here living in Helsinki, in my opinion, one of the best cities on earth. This is a conviction that holds firmly in summer, wavers in January and disappears entirely in February.

I started Very Finnish Problems because I couldn't stop trying to explain the place. Why nobody talks on the bus. Why minus 25 gets cheerfully described as "fresh". How an entire nation can sit in a wooden room, naked and entirely at ease, yet find small talk at a party faintly threatening. Finland might consistently be ranked the happiest country on earth, but it also rations eye contact like it's the last of the coffee. That gap is where all the jokes live.

That became two books, 101 Very Finnish Problems and More Very Finnish Problems, both published by Gummerus and a community of more than 1.3 million people who either live here, used to, married into it the way I did, or are quietly considering it. Since then I've written about Finnish life for media as varied as the Sunday Times, Yle and Cosmopolitan and regularly find myself explaining the place to media all over the world.

The Shop

People kept asking for something real. Not an elk on a mug, but something that actually felt Finnish: perkele, sisu, no niin, the sauna rules nobody explains but everybody obeys. These aren't slogans, they're cultural passwords. The shop's for people who take Finland seriously enough to find it funny. If you've ever sat in comfortable silence and thought, yes, this is fine, you're in the right place.