A former careers information officer, English teacher, youth leader and conference host, Tarja Moles now works as a freelance writer and researcher.
A native of Savonlinna (Nyslott in Swedish), Eastern Finland, she was lured into settling down in the UK after an encounter with an English dentist at the British Museum café. She warned him that she had a history of biting dentists' fingers, but he merely shrugged his shoulders, smiled and bought a pair of gauntlets.
She is a typical Finn in that she loves the sauna, misses plunging into frozen lakes and is allergic to everything. But she believes the genes for endurance sports must have skipped a generation since the game of geocaching with a GPS on Dartmoor is about as much as she can handle.