Tuesday, April 22

We had fallen asleep in the early hours after feasting on homemade pizza. We awoke from our living room quarters at around midday, Brodos on a mattress, me on the comfy sofa. Naturally, Morani and Maddok were already up.

We had known the pair of them for as long as either of us had been a part of the guild. Both members from the early days, this intelligent couple had always been popular and respected figures. Indeed, for around 18 months, Morani had been the lynch-pin of many people’s in-game activities, scheduling, organising and leading the lion’s share of guild raids.

Raids, for the unfamiliar, are lengthy escapades involving a group of 10 to 25 people playing co-operatively to kill a sequence of relatively tough enemies in a series of scripted encounters. Once downed, these enemies drop desirable items which can be used by certain members of the group. Lasting anything from one hour to seven, with the norm hovering somewhere around three, these raids form a central part of many players’ online existence, a trickle of challenges and items which fills the void left by the departure of traditional levelling once a character plateaus at the “endgame”.

I hate them. Organising other people in real life is a pain, but at least you can hit them if they turn up late or forget to bring the tickets. Online, these people are sat at their desks in their own individual lives, sprinkled across a range of different countries. They may be distracted, bored, tired, they may take an important phone call, hear a knock at the door, discover that their house is on fire or simply need to go to the toilet.

Whatever takes their attention away, it leaves between 9 and 24 of their associates tapping their feet, grumbling, even dying (in-game, unless they’re exceptionally stressed) all the while getting increasingly annoyed at the fact that the same boss keeps defeating them again and again. When it does eventually keel over, everyone crosses their fingers for the drop of a decent item, and whatever appears must be distributed according to some mutually agreed-upon system. Losing out is a common cause of resentment.

The difference between undertaking a basic quest - “Go and kill ten frogs,” “Go look at a pond,” “Give this hat to my wife,” - and leading a raid is an equivalent organisational gulf to that between making two slices of toast and planning a wedding. 25 interdependent people, all ostensibly attending for fun, all under pressure and all reliant on you to micro-manage the whole scenario successfully.

With the game’s unusually high contingent of teenage boys, a bad raid is a veritable tinderbox of cock-waving, accusations and drama. It is, unsurprisingly, the reason so many guilds fall apart. It is also one of the reasons ours hasn’t. I tried it for two months and despised it so much I gave up raiding forever, and at that point Morani took over. She’s level-headed and patient, plus her gender doesn’t hurt - nothing stops a roomful of cock-wavers faster than a woman laughing at them. Except perhaps a hand grenade.

She couldn’t do it, of course, without the backing of such a friendly and forgiving group of people. Every guild has had its moments of anger, outbreaks of spectacular argument which occasionally end in somebody leaving for good and insulting all and sundry on the way out. But we are luckier than most in this respect. If I had to pick one trait which identified us as a collective, I would say it was a shared sense of humour. And that leaves any social group reasonably well prepared for the slings and arrows which might be hurled in its direction. Most crises are placed in perspective once you can laugh at them.

Brodos and I had met Morani and Maddok once before, at the guild party in Reading. We already knew we were going to enjoy this part of the trip, so we felt comfortable to switch off charm duty and simply sit on their sofa eating sweets.

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I chewed over another lump of licorice, wearing the expression of a man who has just rectally ingested five lemons. Brodos wisely decided not to eat one. Then our flight was called, and we shuffled aboard a plane the size of a trouser leg, paused briefly to take in the charming air hostess - a fading beauty with a basket full of mini Mars bars - and left Finnish soil as vertically as we had arrived. One hour later we touched down in Sweden for the first time in our lives.

The quaint town of Norrkoping (pronounced “Nor-churp-ing”) is renowned for being dull. The wait for the train was short, so we grabbed some food in the station café. With no discernable vegetarian options, the only choice for refuelling appeared to be the wide selection of cakes. While Brodos does eat meat, his wariness of foreign retail scenarios forced him to take the simplest option, which was for me to double my order. So we ate cakes for tea. It’s the kind of meal you dream about as a child. It’s not as good as you expect.

Next, we discovered our train was cancelled, so we headed into town to kill the hour long wait until the next one. On our travels, we discovered a sign that looked rude if you tried hard to make it, some kind of waterway, a statue of a man and the faintly unsettling experience of two clocks chiming 6pm at different times. First the big one, seemingly the town hall, clonged its bell, then after a short pause, the neighbouring church had a go. Church or state - we wondered who was right. The smart money’s on God. You wouldn’t catch an omniscient, omnipotent entity with a broken watch.

It was dark when we finally arrived in Kalmar. A minute or two later, Morani and Maddok stepped off a bus to meed us, aided by their horse-sized dog, Mingla. They would be our hosts for the next four nights. I would leave their home with barely functioning kidneys, bite wounds and bruises that refused to fade for a fortnight. None of these were caused by the dog.

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You have 1 new friend request. Hooray! How exciting. Maybe it’s Bob from university. He was crazy, always wearing that hat and trying to kick pigeons. Haven’t seen him in ages. Or it might be Suzie from accounts. She’s been really chatty lately and she definitely uses the web outside of work. It could even be that girl from the party seven years ago, the drunk one with the Ug boots and the lisp. Wouldn’t mind seeing her again. Click. Click. Username. Password. Click. Loading… oh good God. I hate that guy. Get off my Internet!

This is what happens when Facebook goes wrong. It all starts with such optimism. A friend tells you about “this Facebook thing” and convinces you to sign up. You dutifully fill in various details about your existence, select the picture in which you look least like a walrus, then sit back and wait for the buddies to roll in. Let’s find out what all the fuss is about, you think.

Wave one comes. A succession of current acquaintances who already use the site, bolstered by speculative searches for people you know and like. And at the moment, it’s all gravy. Each new name brings a little tingle, loved-ones collected and conveniently filed into your personal pals list like bipedal Pokémon. You can see what they’re up to, scrutinise their photographs, find out who they’re mates with and leave happy messages on their profile for everyone to see.

Wave two next. Over the next couple of months, your roster mushrooms in size as you gleefully start adding anyone and everyone, from your phone, your former workplaces, from courses, colleges, universities, friends of friends and friends of Facebook friends, job contacts, the postman, the bloke from the garage and someone you once walked past in a supermarket. At the same time, surprises keep trickling into your inbox - your first love, a forgotten childhood chum, even older family members, computer-illiterate types who write full Internet addresses into Google then double-click the result. Slowly, surely, you start to realise that Facebook is amazing.

But then it happens. A friend request comes that bursts your gleeful Poké-bubble. Often it’s someone from school, some blinkered idiot who thinks the passing of a decade means you’ll have forgotten that they reported you for smoking at breaktime, stole your crisps or kissed Sharon Parker. Sat there smirking in their smug boxed mugshot, raking up your memories like a demented park keeper.

Your mouse icon hovers over the Confirm button. Your adult brain says it’s time to let bygones be bygones, time to give this former nemesis privileged access to the minutiae of your modern life, access to your social circle and holiday snaps, because, well, you’re all older now and that was all in the past. You glance up to the right. 9 Group Invitations. 12 Funwall Friends Requests. 24 Zombie Requests. 5 Vampire Requests. An endless column of drivel spilling off the bottom of the screen. Your mouse hand drifts back to the Confirm button while your resurrected friend-in-waiting grins at you.

And it dawns on you. There’s a reason that he isn’t in your phone. There’s a reason you don’t have his email address. There’s a reason, you realize, that you didn’t stay in touch with so many of these people, special and beautiful and wonderful though they all are. It’s because you couldn’t be bothered.

You have 1 new friend request. You click Ignore.

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Monday, April 21

This was to be our first long haul journey. Three trains, two bus rides and one flight, with a total travel time of around half a day. Fresh from a grand old weekend in Finland, we had a weighty stockpile of cheerfulness to last us the trip.

The first leg began on board a double decker train. These seem to be common across much of Europe, but they’re a great novelty for Brits. Our country hasn’t got round to making these yet. We’re a bus kind of people: bottom deck for po-faced commuting, top deck for naughtiness. I used to ride on the upper floor of a double decker bus to and from secondary school, before officially moving downstairs at the age of 15 after years of minor scuffles culminated in somebody throwing a cow’s eyeball at my head.

Brodos and I whiled away the journey by cycling through our various forms of entertainment: videogames, books, conversation and our iPod supply - the latter now reduced in quantity by 50 per cent, and quality by around 95 per cent. Between these bouts of media consumption, we peered out of the window, marvelling at the sheer squareness of most of the buildings.

Finland may be Scandinavian but to somebody from the far west of Europe it conveys a tantalising hint of Russia. Sparse, cold and practical, uniform collections of trackside architecture separated by great expanses of water and thousands upon thousands of instances of the country’s sole tree. It was a beautiful sight, but you wouldn’t call it pretty. That would come in two stops time, at the picture postcard university town of Lund, in Sweden.

Disembarking on the outskirts of Helsinki, we took a bus to the airport (Brodos: “You do the talking,”) and killed time eating, browsing shops and taking photographs of anything that sounded faintly rude. We gurgled a little at a Moomin merchandise shop and I bought four small packs of the least pleasant-looking licorice available, in a fit of ill-advised curiosity. It tasted like the charred anus of a dog. I decided to fob the unopened boxes off on our next hosts, Morani and Maddok, as a “gift from Finland”.

Looking back, I envy that innocent young traveller, carrying his tiny payload of licorice as if it was the most natural thing in the world. For now I have seen the full horror of Scandinavian confectionery, I fear that person is lost forever. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, sweating and terrified after nightmares haunted by these “sweets”, rattling around in their poisonous little tins like tiny pellets of pestilence and plague.

That, however, is a tale for later.

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Kiss Me Meter

Mouths are confusing. It’s a well known fact that the inside of the human being is much uglier than the outside. A brief glimpse of televised surgery is all that’s needed to remind us that levering open even the most sculpted torso reveals little more than a fleshy swamp of lumps and gristle.

To keep ourselves happy and sane, it’s best not to talk about, or even think about, the hidden grotesquery at the core of your loved ones. Yet there, slap bang in the middle of our faces, lies a brazen reminder of this tangle of guts beneath our skin. This great flappy hole, known as the mouth, leads directly to our innards, and it is nothing short of morbid. Its sheer versaility and usefulness are no excuse. In this age of superscience and genetic experimentation we should be campaigning for a less primitive solution to consuming and communicating than a big toothy anus on our head.

But tolerance for mouths is surprisingly high. There are even those who find them alluring, perverts who idolise pearly teeth, glossy lips and a broad smile to such an extent they find themselves able to ignore the pulsating, bloody horrors that lurk within. They kiss, these people, expressing their affections for one another by pressing the flexible openings on their respective jaws together in a sick and monstrous embrace, oblivious to the half digested lunch and biscuits lurking just tens of centimetres down the pipe.

It’s a mystery. Since moving in to the shed, all our relationships have been conducted the proper way, over the internet. We use nothing more than vibrating USB chairs and an elaborate series of text commands. It’s clean, easy and totally risk free, provided you erase all traces of your identity the second your partner expresses an interest in an English visa.

There is, however, a new gadget which has faintly piqued our interest in mouths. Not because we like them, you understand, but because we like small pieces of technology that cost about £10. It’s called the Kiss Me Meter and it tells you exactly how hideous your facehole is on a scale of one to five. Measuring the amount of hydrogen sulphide in your breath - left behind after you eat - it calculates your stinkiness and lights up the corresponding icon, from a tragic smelling broken red heart to a healthy, whole green one. We’re not sure green hearts are technically healthy, but never mind.

Ours, of course, defaults to the broken heart whenever anyone uses it. At least it would if we allowed anyone to open their mouth near us. Filthy beasts.

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Another gadgets interlude from “The Shed”.

Sountina Speakers

Speakers stand on hallowed turf. We’re well aware that our strange fondness for gadgets is not universal - most would rather have a nice cup of tea and a sandwich than waste time fawning over a GPS collar for their dog - but speakers dwell in a different domain to the average pointless gadget. A place known as the land of the dad.

This territory was first observed in the childhood of the shed. Our father, a man for whom programming a video recorder required four days of research, who would stand flummoxed at a cash machine before walking inside the bank to withdraw £20, a man whose stovetop coffee maker actually exploded, had a dearly beloved stereo in the attic. Unlike his son’s first real stereo, a one-size-fits-all grey lump with two bundled speakers, this device was comprised of separate parts, each bearing a different brand name. CD player, radio, cassette deck, amplifier and graphic equalizer, seemingly gathered from the four corners of the audiophile’s globe and united in a single, ominous black tower. He didn’t use it very much, of course, but its mere presence was sufficient to stifle the sonic chasm in his soul.

The icing on that cake of cuboid tiers was the speakers. Like every other component, they were perfectly chosen, and while we now sense the advice of a predatory audio visual salesman may have played a greater part that we had realised as a youth, if that gave pater the sense of manly satisfaction he needed, then who are we to complain.

Today, speakers fall into two categories: normal and stupid. The normal ones come in a traditional box shape and convert electrical signals from your music source into actual sounds. Stupid ones come in any other kind of shape and, while they do also convert electrical signals from your music source into actual sounds, their primary function is to imply great wealth to anybody visiting the owner’s house, apartment or - oh, to dream - shed. They can look like anything, from the Big Brother diary room chair to a floating orb to a scale model of the underground heating system of a hospital. Whatever form they take, there will be a very good reason given for said appearance in the promotional literature, doubtless citing extensive laboratory research by devoted audio boffins. This functions as a useful diversionary tactic to help the purchaser hide from the fact that he is merely buying it in order to look rich.

The Sountina speaker, recently put into production by Sony in Japan, is firmly embedded in the “stupid” camp. Essentially it’s a glass tube. A six foot glass tube, crafted from organic glass - which sounds like it makes as much sense as free range rubber - that stands upright in the middle of your lounge, yacht or castle, pumping out sound in 360 degrees. That’s pretty much all available degrees. Any more would just be confusing.

God only knows if it’s any good, but if you can afford one you’re probably too busy driving your 12 Ferraris across the Moon to care about anything so trivial. In which case, we’d heartily recommend it. Just make sure it doesn’t fall over.

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Monday, April 21

It’s universally acknowledged that Mondays are rubbish. For the Iscaria family, this was the start of a normal working week. Brodos and I felt a million miles from everyday life, from drudgery, boredom, chores and normal sleep patterns. But we did our bit to sympathise by waking up before 8am.

Within an hour, we were at the station. And as we said goodbye to the physical form of the text-and-pixel based entity we had known for two years, as we shook the hand of the stranger who had invited us into his house with open arms, as we smiled, with genuine warmth, at this person from a far away place that we now knew, once and for all, we could call a friend, I realised something truly important. I had forgotten my iPod.

But that wasn’t all. Our fears of awkwardness, our concerns about what awaited us in these unchartered corners of the internet, were abandoned too. No longer was our ill-planned adventure an uncertain leap into the unknown. It was irrefutably an incredibly good idea. In that welcoming, family home, that beautiful, snowy landscape, we had left behind our worries. Plus, it later emerged, a couple of socks.

It was a heartening thought. I needed that. Without my iPod, the next 12 hours were going to have to be spent talking to Brodos.

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Sunday, April 20

We awoke bright and early around midday, finally relieving the kitchen table of its delicious but three-hours-old edible payload. Today we would venture out into the wilds of the town, so we needed to stock up on calories.

First stop was a massive tower up a big hill. It probably has a name, but it doesn’t matter. It’s just a massive tower, built for people to climb up and gaze out across Kuopio. We peered down from the sky. And what a strange place it was.

With just over 5 million Fins inhabiting a country substantially bigger than Britain, there’s so much space lying around that town planning appears no more complex than spinning around with your eyes closed and pointing to an empty spot. Industrial, residential and commercial zones all neatly plonked in their own area, divided by yet more land and a billion trees, or rather by one tree cloned a billion times. More than anything, it reminded me of Sim City. It goes without saying that it was beautiful.

Once we’d had our fill, we retreated inside and pondered the tower’s restaurant menu. I can’t remember the standout dish - griddled moose or sun-dried otter, something exotic like that - but as it cost about £20, we decided to raid Iscaria’s kitchen instead.

After lunch came bowling, which was exactly the same as bowling in England, minus the chavs. Then we headed into the town centre proper.

This was the life. Strolling around a foreign land with our international chum, chatting about nonsense, inexplicably speaking in Russian accents and looking for swear words to photograph. We saw the town hall, the docks, shops, churches and park-style areas, marvelling all the way at how the internet was really a lot like real life back home, except with a bit more dust.

Unsurprisingly, dinner had been ready for hours by the time we got back. It was like our trademark.

In the evening, we decided it would be a good idea to start planning our trip. This led to some interesting surprises. We discovered that our next destination of Kalmar in Sweden lay to the south, not the north. We worked out which countries we’d pass through on our journey from Lund in Sweden, our third stop, to Belgrade in Serbia. We found out, in fact, where Serbia actually was.

In summary, we realised we didn’t actually have a clue what we were doing, fumbling across Europe with a handful of tickets, a few mobile phone numbers and World of Warcraft our best means of communication with our various hosts prior to arrival. The internet: helping idiots travel since 2006.

We ended the day with a second and final sauna - pants on - then slept.

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Later that evening, I had the first sauna of my life.

To understand the importance of the steam room to the Finnish lifestyle, it’s helpful to know that this room was built first, and the rest of the house moulded around it. Iscaria chopped wood for the stove, while Brodos and I prepared ourselves to be cooked by marinading our innards with beer.

There was a problem. The sauna experience involves nudity, yet we were British. British people don’t do nudity. We pop out into this world pre-dressed in a full dinner suit and continue through life without ever taking our clothes off, not even in the bath. It just wouldn’t be proper.

You might also recall an earlier mention of the high levels of metal affixed to Brodos. For some reason which eludes all right-thinking members of society, this extends below the waist. In itself, this is madness, but combined with steam, the idea becomes truly horrifying. So Brodos insisted everyone kept their pants on. This was utterly out of the ordinary for Iscaria, but a great relief to me, as it meant I could simultaneously avoid accusations of prudishness and the sight of other people’s cocks.

It turned out that saunas are very hot. The English contingent rotated between sitting down, standing under a cold shower and exiting the room in a desperate attempt not to die. Then we’d head back in and repeat the sequence.

Afterwards, once I got over the loss of all the hairs in my nostrils and the top three layers of my skin, I discovered I felt great. We headed to the kitchen, finally met Iscaria’s dad Hannu, and spent the end of the night chatting to everyone and eating chocolate.

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Foreign shops are exciting. I’d learned this on school trips, marvelling at live lobsters in French hypermarkets and 900 varieties of pickled cabbage on the shelves of Germany. Our first internet supermarket trip was no less exciting.

They’re not short of land in Finland - Kuopio’s so spacious you need a packed lunch just to walk to the shop - so this food store was free to distribute its bulk across the equivalent of five football pitches. Like a Tesco Extra but with funny writing on all the packaging.

We bumped into Iscaria’s older sister, Mirva, and her husband Jimmy, by the tomatoes, and exchanged pleasantries about what in god’s name Brodos and I were doing travelling around half of Europe with a nerd we barely knew to meet a gaggle of strangers who, for all we could tell, might actually dress up in wizard hats when playing World of Warcraft. They seemed to quite like the idea, and we certainly liked them, chatting away to us like friends as if English was their native tongue. Jimmy’s mastery of the language was especially convincing, even down to his use of a proper cockney accent. It emerged that he was English.

The supermarket was also home to an incredible recycling device. Like a reverse vending machine, this magical unit ate empty cans and bottles, conveyor-belted them off to some mysterious environmentally friendly dimension, then spat out tickets that could be exchanged for actual money. Well, Finnish money. Actual money is pounds.

A school in my town has just introduced one of these machines. Here, it is so exciting that we put it in the newspaper. In Finland, you couldn’t even impress a Dwarf with one.

Back at the house, we whiled away the afternoon cack-handedly creating the most hideous pizza in Northern Europe, a kind of cheese-topped wheat pillow. Meanwhile, Seija (Iscaria’s mum) and Mirva were attending the funeral of a close family friend. We’d been told about this at the airport, and had feared our presence would be a terrible imposition. Yet when Seija returned to find the three of us merrily geeking away the evening with videogames, the reality couldn’t have been more different, and she talked to us about it as if she’d known us for years.

“I told him he’d never make friends, playing on the computer all day,” she said, as Iscaria tapped away on the keyboard. “Yet here you are.” It was lovely. Ever so slightly, I think we helped take her mind off the sadness of the day.

She even said the pizza was nice. We’d been trying to forget it for hours.

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