Hello from Somero to Finn-Guild Members!

A special hello to anyone reading this through the link published in the Horisontti Magazine, and welcome to the blog!

http://www.finn-guild.org/fi/content/horisontti-kevat-2012

Horisontti Magazine is published four times a year and is aimed at people having links with both Finland and Britain (you can see it online from the link above). This blog has been mentioned in the latest edition, so if we have new visitors as a result, hello to you from Somero!

In case you are wondering what this is all about, the blog was orginally set up just a few weeks ago at the end of January. This was to coincide with the start of the Somero English Club, which is a group set up so that people could meet together in an informal and relaxed atmosphere and chat in English.

Eighteen people turned up to our first meeting, and the idea of the blog was simply to give them something to read in English. I expected just a few people to log on when they had nothing better to do. As it turns out, in the first five weeks we have had almost 6000 pageviews, with visitors from as far away as Australia, South Africa, Japan and Sri Lanka, as well as many European countries. It's nice to think that pictures of Somero have been viewed literally all over the world!

At the beginning of February I rang Ossi Laurila, the editor of Horisontti, to talk to him about writing an article for the magazine and I mentioned that I had just started this blog. It then turned out that not only had I actually worked with Ossi on a radio programme twenty years ago, but also - that of all the places in Finland he could have come from, his home town was in fact Somero! So yes, it is a small world indeed. 

So there it is. The Somero English Club has so far met three times. There are now 22 regular members divided into two groups and I can honestly say that both groups are a really special set of people. Last week I introduced Group A on the blog and promised to do the same with Group B the next day until I was suddenly struck down with various illnesses, leaving the blog unwritten and Group B still in the shadows. I promise to finally introduce them tomorrow - but before then, just so you get a clue as to the nature of the group, here are the people they suggested for the guest list of our fictional dinner party.

• John Steinbeck
• Paavo Väyrynen
• Nigella Lawson
• Leo Haltsonen (Mayor of Somero)
• Antti Sarpila
• M.A.Numminen

Do you see the way that culture and Somero have been cleverly mixed together here? Poor Nigella ended up being the only woman to be invited and may even end up doing the cooking unless any of the others have secret talents in the kitchen.... but at least with this dinner party crowd we can be guaranteed to get a good conversation going. Which of course was the point. So hello from Somero to readers of Horisontti Magazine. I hope you will join us again tomorrow to see who our dinner guests were invited by!