Mid-December
The east looked pretty much like the north, more lakes, more villages, more polished pine rooms, more saunas. Wilderness took his “British Night Out” to Mikkeli (four times) to Imatra (three times) and to a couple of dozen villages along the Karelian border with Russia, up as far as Lake Pielinen. On several occasions he calculated he was less than a hundred miles from Leningrad. Winter brought one blessing—the exquisite poets, the chroniclers of English folk music and the historians of Celtic archaeology didn’t want anything to do with a sub-zero Finland or a Finland under snow. Wilderness travelled in white silence.
Momo proved to be the bellwether of Finnish taste. The avant-garde received a glacial gratitude and the Carry On films left them wanting more.
It became almost a delight—but not quite—to get back to Helsinki and news from home.
Eddie to Wilderness:
—I’ve got a barrow-load of statistics for you. Boring as hell but you did ask.
Wilderness could not remember why he’d asked. He glanced through, flipping pages far too quickly. It had taken him over an hour to decode and he was already getting impatient.
—Most nickel comes out of former colonies. Belgian Congo, Northern Rhodesia, now just called Congo and Zambia. China’s on the rise, but still lags a long way behind the Congo. USA hardly charts, UK not even on the map. Russian production fair to middling.
—But here’s something you didn’t ask about. Cobalt. Number 27 on the periodic table. Most cobalt is derived from nickel ore. It’s not rare. 32nd most common element on Earth. But there’s rarity and rarity. Most nickel ore comes out of central Africa. Most refined cobalt comes from Finland, simply because they import and refine so much nickel on top of what they mine themselves. I can’t find any figures for Finnish cobalt for the last two years. Or for that matter for Russian cobalt. But I’ve gone over all the stats for cobalt from the Congo since 1948. The Congo got its independence from Belgium in 1960. Ever since then it’s been in a state of intermittent civil war, Katanga, Lumumba and so on …
Get on with it, Eddie!
—… and that’s disrupted production and accounting. Figures for 1959 are pretty consistent with figures for the previous ten years. No figures for 1960. 1961 appears to record a surge in production that I find unbelievable. Production drops every year since, so it looks as though the war is taking its toll. It doesn’t make sense. I would have expected a pattern showing production trailing off right from the outbreak of hostilities in 1960—the one year for which I don’t have figures. So I went over them all again. You know what? Sometime between the 1959 stats and the 1961 stats some dozy apeth put the decimal point in the wrong place. There was no surge and production has trailed off steadily for over five years. I reckon that there is only 10% of Congolese cobalt in “circulation” than what is currently estimated from the stats. For all that it’s a common element, the world is short of cobalt right now. As I said, there’s rarity and rarity. Shares in cobalt stocks may be undervalued by 40-50%. If I were that sort of bloke, and I’m not, I’d be buying cobalt stock as fast as I could.