An unexpected glimpse of Utopia

It’s always so unpleasant to enter Britain.

The queues are endless and very tense, the officials poorly paid and bad tempered.

There is always such frustration and impatience in the air.

And no-one ever seems to have thought or asked

Do we need this?

Do we really need to make it so difficult to enter our unhappy country?

Why is it we are so afraid of strangers?

Couldn’t we welcome them instead?

Isn’t there a different way of doing things?

Well obviously there is, because it was so easy to enter Finland.

I’d allowed for two hours of nonsense, but instead I was through in twenty minutes.

Someone really had thought about it, you see,

Or many people had,

And understood that because we had already shown our passports before we got onto the plane

We wouldn’t need to show them when we got off again.

And that’s why I found myself with time to admire Helsinki Airport’s Railway Station,

So huge and somehow sacred like a cathedral

An escalator to heaven, maybe, but not to hell

Because instead I found myself in Tikkurila

A suburban station with an intercity interchange

Where I laughed with an open-hearted person in a coffee bar

And felt happy because I saw a poster that said

Pieni kahvi

And knew it meant “A small coffee”.

And happy too, perhaps absurdly,

Because we’ve invented a system that allows this small cafe in Finland

To communicate with my huge bank in Scotland

Communicate instantaneously

To pay for a coffee and a pastry.

That incredible capacity to communicate,

And to co-operate too,

Something that somehow enables all these trains to rush in and out of this suburban station

And could even tell me about their times in Scotland.

The extraordinary systems that co-ordinate all the aeroplanes,

And the one that I came in,

So we don’t go to the wrong places, or get lost, or collide with each other.

Surely if we can achieve all this with goodwill and co-operation

I’m thinking, naively but truly,

If we can achieve all this

We can also collaborate to end the crises in the climate and in everything

That is threatening the lives of all of us on this planet?

Can’t we?

(PS Thank you for reading this. I hope it gave you pleasure. My plan is only to publish twice a week, Wednesday and Saturday, so my next post may take a while. I’ll do my best to make it worth the wait.)