Finland to Germany: How I built my own gap year

I finished boarding school in one of those bright, hopeful summers when everyone around me seemed to know exactly how their next chapter would unfold. I had a place waiting at Warwick University for September, a clear path in front of me and no real reason to question it, yet within a few weeks of being home I felt a growing certainty that I wasn’t quite ready to leap straight back into an academic cycle. After six years away while my parents lived in Norway, they had only just settled again in England, and the idea of racing off to university without pausing for breath felt like the wrong kind of momentum.

So I deferred the place and took myself to their new house in Cheltenham, where I took a temp job at Eagle Star Insurance. The days seemed long, the tasks repetitive and the tea breaks oddly instructive, and as summer rolled into autumn I started writing long, optimistic letters in search of something broader, more adventurous and decidedly less fluorescent-lit.

I did, however, enjoy the social education of the three-pint lunches every Thursday and Friday.

My affection for Scandinavia, shaped by those childhood years in Norway, nudged me towards sending speculative letters to several embassies, including Finland, and also to the British Army, both in the hope of something that might stretch the year into actual discovery.

Finland by post and pure nerve

Months later an envelope landed on the doormat, and the excitement of opening it felt almost cinematic. In a pre-email world, the arrival of a letter with the potential to alter your life carried a charge that is hard to recapture now. Their reply did exactly that. After an interview call wit the embassy (I don’t recall there being an physical meetings), I found myself preparing for four months in a small central Finnish town called Jämsä, living and working in a Matkakoti (guest house) beside the railway station, helping the owners with odd jobs and conversational English in exchange for room and board.

Around the same time I heard back from the Army Education department, inviting me for an interview for their summer programme supervising teenagers on a British Army base in Germany. I went, I did the interview, and to my delight I passed. Suddenly, the year ahead contained a six-month European arc I could never have imagined a few months earlier.

Finland came first that spring. I waved my parents off at the coach station and made for the airport alone with a Walkman and, inexplicably, a copy of The Go-Between, which I had read for GCSE English and thrown into my bag without much thought. Finland in late spring is quietly astonishing, but those first few weeks felt stark, silent and began to get quite boring. There’s only so many times I can re-read the two music magazines I bought with me and the TV channels there didn't show many English speaking programmes.

The owner of the Matkakoti, sensing this long before I could articulate it, introduced me to a local school, and within weeks I was giving a presentation to students my age and, almost overnight, being swept into a circle of new friends, late-night conversations and that sudden teenage camaraderie that seems to blossom precisely when you feel far from home. Being British also carried a peculiar cachet; I was seen as slightly exotic, from one of the “cool countries”, which certainly didn’t hurt.

Those four months became a patchwork of experiences that still feel almost too rich to have happened in such quick succession. I spent midsummer at a rock festival far up on the west coast, took a weekend coach trip to Leningrad while it still bore that name, and in one gloriously cheeky moment blagged a press pass to Ruisrock in Turku and found myself inches from the stage as Living Colour, Billy Idol and Blondie tore through their sets. Finland became a place I loved instinctively and without planning, and it left a mark on me that has lasted far longer than the summer itself. As a side note, I returned there for New Years five years later with a friend and there were a couple of drawings of their dog framed on the wall that I had completely forgotten I did during the quieter early periods of my visit.

Germany and a crash course in responsibility

After returning to England for just five days, I was off again, this time to Herford in Germany for the Army role. The decision felt bold but also strangely natural; I was still riding the momentum of Finland and didn’t overthink it. I moved into the officers’ mess, a setting that felt equal parts intimidating and delightfully grown-up,, and spent my days supervising teenagers on day trips and activities who had grown up on army bases across Europe.

They carried a mixture of resilience, humour and restlessness that was unexpectedly moving, and they taught me far more about adaptability and emotional intelligence than I expected from a summer job. In many ways they reminded me of myself; I had been a younger version of them when I lived on an Air Force base in Germany between the ages of eight and eleven.

Herford itself had a distinct rhythm. Early mornings, long days, shared meals, and those pockets of quiet where you felt you were living inside a parallel version of Britain with its own logic and rituals. It was the first time I had been truly entrusted with the wellbeing of other people, and that responsibility sharpened parts of me I didn’t yet realise needed sharpening.

Interrail, friendships and the long way home

When the summer finally tapered off, I still wasn’t ready to return home. A friend from Finland met me in Berlin and we set off Interrailing, drifting through Munich and on to Kempton to stay with a school friend’s family before heading to Beaune in France, where my sister was studying for the year. From there the three of us travelled south to Montpellier for a few sun-soaked and mildly chaotic days of camping before beginning the long journey back via Paris, Cherbourg and the final ferry home.

I arrived back in England with a rucksack that smelled faintly of forests, trains and cheap campsite detergent, and eight days later I was sitting in a lecture hall at Oxford Brookes pretending I was fully ready for the next chapter.

What that year really taught me

Looking back, nothing about that year was neat or predictable, but its very looseness turned out to be its true value. I discovered how far a stamped envelope and a bit of nerve can take you, how quickly loneliness can turn into friendship when you stay open to the moment, how to find your footing in places where you know no one, and how responsibility has a habit of arriving quietly and earlier than expected. I also learned that Europe, even before low-cost flights and instant booking, had an extraordinary way of stretching your sense of what is possible.

And when I revisit it now, with the benefit of a few decades’ distance, I realise something I never gave myself credit for at the time. It was, in its own small way, quite an extraordinary thing to have engineered. No programme. No structure. No one smoothing the path.

Just a handful of letters, a willingness to follow the thread wherever it led, and a belief that something interesting might happen if I nudged the door. It was the first time I made my own luck, and without knowing it I repeated the trick years later when I moved to the United States, and again when I reinvented my life in Switzerland.