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Sensible place, this: the cars are parked in docks and you plug them into a heater for an hour or two before setting off; instead of vacuum cleaners there are these pipes which take all the dust god knows where; in the supermarket, the massive Prisma we visited today, the conveyor belt diverts into two so there is no hold-up. The roads are sensible too, no-one drives too fast or too rude, and pedestrians zing about on skis and sledges...

The temperature is perfect, minus one or two, barely any breeze, dry and clean. Only when the wind picks up do you feel like you're out of your comfort zone.

We walk up through the woods at the back of the house to the lake, a few hundred metres across, a long oval with us at the western tip; frozen solid, tracks all across the surface, but we take no chances, dragging the kids on sledges round the edge, the sun peeking through the trees, an impotent orange blob, past bathing huts which must be for the summer swimmers, where we bump into a middle-aged local woman.

"Where are you from?" she asks.

We tell her.

"Ah, but where?"

We tell her.

"Ah, yes, Highgate, Hampstead, I have been there... and you are visiting with your grandchildren, yes?"

Throwing her through the frozen ice we continue to the other end, where a huge misshapen tower dominates the heavy grey sky, and Mad Max-style ploughs scrape the roads, and there are Swastikas on lamp-posts - very white, Oulu. The walk back along the southern lip is harder, the snow deeper, trees more dense; past a little wooden school with a cross on its side and swings out front, beside the lake. Feels rather like a scene from The Road. By the time we get home we've done a kilometre or so and feel fresh; the sun begins to set and the night falls quick, those twilight Lapland blues fading to black.