The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia

by Michael Booth

Ask any journalist about their worst nightmare and it will likely be that they have conducted a fascinating, revealing, intimate interview with someone really, really famous and then come rushing home, for once actually excited about transcribing the conversation, only to discover that their tape recorder hasn’t worked. It happened to me when I was interviewing the most famous man in the world. I had traveled to the capital of Lapland, Rovaniemi, on the edge of the Finnish Arctic Circle, together with my ten-year-old son. It was July, the season of the white nights, with twenty-four-hour sunlight. One o’clock in the morning was just like one in the afternoon; deeply discombobulating. Finland was also in the midst of a rare heat wave. Together, the raging white light and the sweltering heat created a whole heap of cognitive dissonance as we arrived that evening at Santa Claus Village, “The Official Home of Father Christmas,” amid the pine forests fifteen miles north of the city. We stood in our shorts and T-shirts, waiting in line to enter Santa’s grotto, listening to Christmas carols, watching videos of reindeer gamboling in the snow, and trying to summon some yuletide spirit.