I used my Russian skills in real life today, in a really unexpected situation!

Despite being sick I dragged myself over to church to attend the evening midsummer service, as I had not been in church for ages. Midsummer is a big deal in Sweden since it doesn't get dark at night for about a month.

Well, the church I went to was the Laestadian church in Stockholm, which is a kind of old fashioned Scandinavian Luthern church. It's from Northern Sweden originally, and it's quite common in Finland and Norway too.

But today, a group of Russians from Northern Russia was in church, having arrived for some kind of Christian revival meeting later in June, in a different city.

It turned out that they had been practicing Laestadian Christianity in Russia ever since the 19th century -- miraculously their faith had survived 75 years of being completely cut off from the main part of this movement. Everyone in the Scandinavian church had forgotten about them, and vice versa.

But then, some people in Finland had discovered by complete chance that these Russians were still practicing Laestadian Christianity. They decided to invite them to come to Finland and participate ub the bigger group's meetings along with everyone else.

It was really touching to hear how the Russian believers had stuck to their faith and kept it secret during most of the Soviet times -- A bit like the early Christians in Rome. Not sure what would have happened if they had been open about it.

More recently however, the challenge had been that the children were too materialistic and not interested in religion - leaving the area for St Petersburg or Moscow and dropping the faith too.

Only one person in their group could speak English to a useful level, so I ended up speaking Russian with several of them. I was really impressed that they went to so much trouble and expense to come to Sweden - they were not well off and had some serious communication problems.

Others in the church were impressed by my Russian skills, but I had to admit that I was just about able to communicate and was literally spitting out grammatical mistakes in every sentence, as I am out of practice. But I was able to translated some nice well wishing phrases, ask about families and things like that

Well, happy Midsummer everybody - this is the shortest night of the year!