You're probably delighted to hear that you can play a Finlandic version of CNPS in Finland. They have a similar system to us. Of course you can't mix and match and use Finlandic numbers in your UK game, but if in a few years, with the change in registrations here, you find it too difficult to complete your task, you could go and live in Finland for five years and do it there (there are not many people or cars in Finland, so it might take you longer). I got up as far as 1 in Finlandic CNPS (or FCNPS). So I may have to come back for more visits to my new friends in Kotka.
Norway number plates were not suitable for CNPS, once more proving the superiority of the Finns over the Norwegs.
My stay has been brief, but highly enjoyable. I was driven to the airport (a two hour journey) by a man I had only briefly met on Saturday and who was the husband of one of the theatre bigwigs.
He filled me in with more stories from the Red House, including a slightly tragic (and yet oddly life affirming )one that he was possibly recounting for humorous effect. It was hard to tell.
In Finland prostitution is not currently illegal, but pimping or providing lodgings for prostitutes is. Thus when the Red House was closed down it was the owner of the building (rather satisfyingly a lawyer) and the doormen and the woman who ran what she claimed was a hotel. Her defence being that she didn't know what the girls were getting up to in their rooms. Not a very good defence. You'd think you'd get suspicious that the hotel rooms were only ever booked by young Russian women, who seemed to have an awful lot of middle-aged businessmen friends and who would all stay for a couple of weeks before returning home, to be replaced by more similar Russian women with more similar (and often the same) middle-aged businessmen friends. You'd think she could have done better what with her lawyer friend.
Anyway, a friend of my driver (who noone ever told me the name of and who I was embarrassed to ask at this late stage) was called as a witness at the trial. He had met his wife in the whorehouse where she was working as a prostitute. It doesn't seem a very romantic start, but this is the rather tragic part, which helped prove the culpability of the woman who claimed she was merely running a hotel.
Apparently the friend's now wife been offered work in Kotke as a waitress for a few weeks. However, when she got there she was told that the room she was staying in cost about £100 a night. Obviously she had no way to pay this, and her only real option was to sell her body at £30 a time. The place was run by gangsters. She feared for herself and her family and her child back in Russia.
This unfortunate woman had never done anything like this before and was unable to make the money required to even pay for her room. But her time in Finland was up. The way the matter was resolved was that she would have to come back to the Red House at a later date to earn the money she owed.
Of course this was a bit of a Catch 22 situation as the room would still cost £100 a night and she'd still have to pay that off as well.
Luckily, and here is the part that is maybe a little romantic (or perhaps if you are more cynical a good example of the non-romantic trade-offs we all make in the choice of our life-time partners) she met the friend of the man driving me to the airport. She was very attractive and he fell in love with her and he offered to pay off all the money that she owed and then she fell in love with him.
Whatever the truth, he rescued her from this horrible situation and they were married.
Then his testimony helped put away the people who had placed her in this horrible situation in the first place.
So there's some justice in there somewhere. And I think something romantic too. Necessity is the mother of invention and possibly of many sexual entanglements, but that's not to say that love can't play a part too.
You might see the man as a slightly seedy sad-case who had to get his jollies from prostitutes and then bought one for himself, or you might rather chose to see him as a knight, rescuing a young maiden from the red castle in which she had found herself imprisoned.
Alternatively you might see him as a slightly seedy sad-case whorescued a young maiden from the red castle in which she had found herself imprisoned.
Maybe she wasn't the only one who was freed in that relationship.
After all they were married and now he wouldn't go to the Red House even if he hadn't helped to shut it down.
And my nameless friend who drove me to the airport did point out that an awful lot of middle aged men in Kotka seemed to have acquired rather attractive and young Russian wives of late.
We can be quick to judge people for actions that are somewhat universal.
It is slightly charming, coming from London, that a town is able to pinpoint its slimy underbelly quite so effectively.
I don't want to leave you thinking that Kotka is a den of depravity. Quite the opposite. The fact that the Red House is so notorious (all over Finland apparently, and now thanks to me all over the rest of the world) is proof of that, I think.
