Daily Telegraph - 'Just back' article

It was like someone had cut a thousand tiny holes in a gown of midnight blue and set it with diamonds that glittered and pulsed in white and blue and gold.  The night sky I am looking at deep in Northern Finland arcs across the frozen lake on which I stand and envelops me every bit as keenly as the sleeping bag pulled close around my shoulders.

It is bitterly cold.  Daylight had creaked in mid-morning and left again before the afternoon was through.  Outside lights on the few buildings at base camp stayed permanently on and the sky remained deadlocked in a soft gentle greyness typical of the mid-months of winter up at the Arctic Circle.  The snow was deep and soft and lay in drifts like mounds of icy sugar into which our boots and then our legs sank and disappeared.  We worked hard to build the snow shelter in which we planned to sleep that night.  It was a week’s wilderness skills training over New Year, the eve of which we toasted with Tar Schnapps as we stood looking beyond the bank of pine-trees in which the camp is nestled and up into the night sky, searching for a glimpse of the Northern Lights. 

Now, though, I am standing alone outside the shelter having struggled to sleep.  It was not the cold:  inside the shelter it keeps a steady minus four or minus five degrees and it was not the comfort: but Midnight came and went and the minutes ground around to one a.m. and onto two a.m. and at three o’clock I knew that sleep that night if I stayed, wound into a ball there in the snowy womb, would pass me by. And so I slid down the tunnel quietly and gently so as not to wake my companions, intent on making at some haste my way back across the lake and up through the trees to my cabin.  It wasn’t the cold that froze me as I emerged but rather the stillness and the silence as I raised my face to a monochrome world hung with stars upon stars upon stars.  Stood Orion with his overbearing astral presence as he pulled back his bow and lifted his shield; the Seven Sisters were joined by half a dozen more and the Milky Way had become a strip of speckled beauty pinned onto the velvet darkness clear from one horizon to the next.

I felt the cold assaulting my face and begin the long creep up through my boots and into my bones and I knew I would have to move soon. I began to walk slowly back across the ice and through the snow, feeling it creak and give as it compacted beneath my feet.  Before I disappeared into the trees I turned and took one final look and caught the fleeting trail of a shooting star.

Seeking the Aurora Borealis in Northern Finland - Part 1

When the organising company told me that our direct flights to Kuusamo had been cancelled by mistake and that we would be flying via Stockholm and what’s more there would be a four hour minibus transfer to Oulanka at the other end, I thought seriously about cancelling the trip.   It was expensive, it was over New Year, and I had booked it rather on a whim on coming back from Cuba in September and discovering that the disruption in my life continued.  Being away at New Year, a long way away, somewhere where the physical demands of the trip would force me to think of nothing else than dealing with the extreme environment I was in, seemed a sensible if slightly uncompromising option.  It also, as a by-product, fulfilled a couple of my never-too-late objectives: to step inside the Arctic Circle and to see a proper display of the Northern Lights.  I’d seen them once before, in Iceland in 2006 when I’d managed to drive for an hour down a motorway in the wrong direction and having turned around arrived at my hotel on the Snaefellsnes peninsula with just minutes to spare before the restaurant closed.   Having shared a bottle of (very expensive) wine with my travelling companion which we finished very quickly (note, expensive anywhere in Scandinavia does not necessarily correlate with ‘good’) and having spent about 6 hours in one position in a very small car, post dinner we were keen to stretch our legs and play about in the snow.  Stepping outside the triple-glazed warmth of the hotel and into the razor-sharp cold of the night we were joshing around until I looked up and said, “hang on a minute, why does the sky look so weird?”

We both stopped and in the quiet stillness turned our gaze upwards and realised, in a slightly dim fashion, that we were seeing the Northern Lights.  It was not a fabulous or momentous display, just a mild glow of green and yellow bands tripping across the sky but it drew us in and kept us there until our hands and feet could take the cold no more.

This New Year, in Finland, far further north, with solar activity more pronounced, I hope to see the Northern  Lights skipping and shimmering across the Arctic sky in a far longer and more intense display.  I have my fingers crossed.