Huliganov’s Finnish Experience #3 – Land of Lakes

Original playout date: 21 December 2007
Duration: 8:15

“We leave Imatra and start to go up country to Puumala. On the way, I take a hitchhiker, Kai, who it turns out lives in England only a few miles away from my first wife and kids. He came back to check up on his property, and he gave me some interesting insights into the region only a few of which you hear here, as this was where my panasonic ran out of batteries and the Fuji picks up the thread from the start of the next instalment. At first you can hear I went out of character when Kai was in the car, but I didn’t want to intimidate him and have him thinking he had got into a car with some crazy person driving, so I hope you’ll understand why that bit is off-accent and off-character. Continue reading “Huliganov’s Finnish Experience #3 – Land of Lakes”

Bleak Midwinter in Finland (with apologies to Christina Rossetti)

First published as part of the Daily Telegraph‘s February 2008 Creative Writing Competition. It was one of the six shortlisted out of about 40 entries. As ever I did not get the first prize, but it attracted a lot of positive responses. The reason for the “lizard and gizzard”  was down to the set words you had to include in the piece for the month, which was a continual feature of the contest. This time “lizard” was one of the words. Or possibly “blizzard”. I can’t even remember which ones the other set words were!

The picture which accompanied it is one of my stills from the visit with the image of Christina Rossetti, the authoress of the original Bleak Midwinter Poem, superimposed.

With Apologies to Christina Rosetti
"With apologies to Christina Rosetti..."

1.
In this bleak midwinter,
Frosty winds beat time;
Mirth stands hard as irony,
Slaughter-like the rime.
Crow is eaten, crow on crow
Crow on corpse of crow,
In this bleak midwinter verse,
Made not long ago. Continue reading “Bleak Midwinter in Finland (with apologies to Christina Rossetti)”