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An early cab from the house to Heathrow, a longish wait, then a 2 hour flight to Copenhagen. The plane has a camera in its nose so you can see what it looks like to take off and land from the pilot's perspective, coming down into Copenhagen you feel like you're landing on the water, then at the last minute you see the runway - the wind shakes the plane and you feel like adventurers, but when you land the airport is just another mall of the usual names, the same old logos.

Another wait, then up over the Baltic Sea to Helsinki, this flight even rockier (the Finnish girl next to me shaking with fear, asking when we might land...) where the waiting room for the internal flight up to Oulu is as dowdy as a bus-station... Then another rattling flight, but at little Oulu airport a cabbie is waiting with a sign and drives us to our temporary home, a warm, kit-design bungalow with underfloor heating and sprinkled with fairy lights.

The roads are icy but manageable; the snow pushed into huge piles by the road; and in Oulo the daylight hours this time of year are 11-3. In Rovaniemi, where we plan to drive in a day or two, the sun is just above the horizon for two hours in twenty four and the temperature takes another plunge down off the scale, almost down to the temperature of Hebden Bridge in June.