About Very Finnish Problems

I'm Joel Willans and I'm a Brit, which in Finland is the sort of thing you find yourself quietly apologising for about once a week. I didn't plan to live here. I met a Finnish woman in London, fell for her and was duly brought back to her homeland on the firm understanding that we'd stay for one year. That was over twenty years ago. She became my wife, the year turned into two decades and somewhere along the line Finland stopped being a temporary arrangement and quietly became home. I've travelled to more than sixty countries and lived on three continents, and I still think Helsinki is one of the best cities on earth and Finland one of the finest places you can be. That conviction holds firmly in summer, wavers a little in January and disappears entirely in February.

Very Finnish Problems began because I couldn't stop trying to explain Finland to people. I wanted to explain why nobody talks on the bus, why silence is never awkward and why minus 25 gets cheerfully described as "fresh". Above all, I wanted to explain how an entire nation can sit in a wooden room in extreme heat, completely naked and completely at ease, yet find small talk at a party faintly threatening. Somewhere along the way I realised that Finland doesn't need parody, it just needs context. It's one of the strangest and most quietly brilliant places I know, and most of the world has no real idea what goes on up here.

Finland is regularly ranked the happiest country in the world, and it's also a place where eye contact is rationed and small talk is treated as a minor inconvenience at best. That gap, between the happiest people on earth and the ones who'd rather take the stairs than share a lift with a colleague, is where all the humour lives.

What started as dry observations about sauna, winter and social discomfort turned into 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 live here, married into it the way I did or are quietly considering it. I've written about Finnish culture for outlets as varied as the Sunday Times, YLE and Cosmopolitan, and I've had short fiction broadcast on BBC Radio, but the books are still the best explanation I've managed.

The Shop

At some point people started asking for something real, not a souvenir or an elk on a mug but something that actually felt Finnish. I mean the words that carry real weight, like perkele, sisu and no niin, the sauna rules nobody explains but everybody obeys, the quiet satisfaction of being left alone without it counting as rude, and the one Finnish word for how you feel after a good sauna that exists only because no other culture ever needed it.

These aren't slogans, they're cultural passwords. If you already know, you know exactly what I mean, and if you've only just moved here, you will soon enough, probably around the time you first hear yourself describe minus 25 as fresh. The shop exists for people who take Finland seriously, which in the VFP tradition means taking it 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.