EVERYONE has heard the clichés; that Finns are shy, that they drink far too much and are more comfortable in forests than they are in cities. But in my experience, the clichés are true of only half the population. I don’t mean roughly half; I mean exactly 50% of the population. Finnish women, as you may have noticed, are actually quite normal. Most can hold conversations on a variety of topics, dress nicely, and frequently laugh in public places. Some can even make eye contact. Most drink in joyful moderation, and are not driven to violence as a result of doing so.

FINNISH men, on the other hand, are a far more worrying lot. While Finnish men may make the best engineers in the world, they are the world’s worst talk show hosts. Topics of conversation seem to be limited to weather, programming in C++, and occasionally Formula One. At parties, while the women are in the kitchen laughing and discussing the issues of the day, the men are sat on the sofa in pained silence. Walls are stared at, lest eye contact encourage some backslider to start a conversation.

IN these situations, alcohol functions less as a social lubricant and more as a kind of defibrillator. Late every Friday night, men who have slumped monosyllabic and sullen over their workstations for 60 hours are suddenly sparked into robust monologues on anything from bus timetables to fashion. As a (female) friend put it, “When men talk to me in nightclubs, I understand why it is best they stay silent the rest of the time.” It seems as if alcohol allows Finnish men to become the kind of people they would want to be while sober; whilst ensuring they do so not with the suave cool of Daniel Craig, but more the stumbling weirdness of Boris Yeltsin.

OF course, these are clichés. We all know some Finnish men who are kind and funny and do not work in mobile communications. But beneath many generalisations we can also find some facts, and in this case there are also some disturbing statistics. It is estimated that some half a million Finns have serious drinking problems. There are more than 4,000 reported cases of domestic violence in Finland every year. It barely needs mentioning that the overwhelming majority of cases are not reported, any more than it does that the overwhelming majority of perpetrators are men. Drunk men, in fact.

I AM appalled by the figures, but I am not shocked. If we consider domestic violence as an explosion at the end of a fuse marked by frustration and resentment, then it should come as no surprise that people with limited communication skills are more frustrated than those with many. IT may be that the men we see cackling hysterically over bottles of fruit wine outside the railway station are not the ones we should be worrying about. It is the apparently normal middle class men on the street who may most often mix the lethal ingredients of frustration, despair and alcohol.

AS Finns travel more and mix more with other cultures, Finnish men will hopefully learn what Finnish women already seem to know; that social chit-chat can be both fun and easy, that wine can be drunk from glasses and not from bottles, and that it is far better to talk about what one feels, than explode from the fear of doing so. In doing so, hopefully some of the deepest and darkest wounds in our society can begin to heal.