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When my son was 8 he approached Philip Pullman in the checkout of our local Sainsburys and discussed Northern Lights with him at considerable length. I was impressed with both of them, John for having read the book and Pullman for not thumping him.

Last year we heard they were filming the book near us in Oxford but we didn’t go and watch Kidman as Mrs Coulter. John’s now 16 and very grumpy about what happens to his books when Hollywood gets hold of them. But he did like the idea of our making our own trip to see the fabled lights before the film came out which is how we came to be in Rovaniemi last month, standing around in an empty snowswept bus station, stamping our feet.

We’d arrived on the overnight train from Helsinki and spent the morning in Arktikum, the only museum in the world dedicated to Pan-Arctic culture. Every country with a toehold in the Arctic Circle is represented. Here we learned that Revontulet (the Finnish name for Aurora Borealis) used to be thought of as the spirits of the dead seeking vengeance. We also learned that they’re hugely popular with Japanese tourists who call them moe-moe. That morning a whole coach-load of salarymen on vacation had arrived from Tokyo and headed north.

We also watched a stunning audiovisual presentation that showed the lights in all their green and yellow glory (red Revontulet are something of a rarity). Evidently those weird sweepy green waves result from charged solar particles whacking into the Earth's upper atmosphere. Personally I still prefer the Sami idea of ghosts coming down to get us.

Soon it was time for our bus up to Sariskela, fours hours through the snow by coach, just about as north as you can get without hitting Norway. I’d been told we could pay by credit card but it turned out this only applies to Finnish credit cards and, damn, I’d forgotten to bring mine. Thank goodness the driver said there was a cash machine in Sodankyla where he’d be stopping for his cigarette break, I could pay him there.

The journey was surprisingly restful, nothing but frozen lakes, bright white snow and birch trees. They say 72 per cent of this country is covered by them. After half an hour of birch I so believed it. I pulled out our beat-up copy of Northern Lights.

"Do you remember Philip Pullman reckons the lights represent a portal through to parallel universes?" I say to John.

“Ah,” he replies then switches his DVD player back on. Of course that's the problem with children. Eight years later they’ve developed an interest in martial arts movies.

We arrived in Sariselka in time for supper and a chat with Marie, the hotel manager, who told me that they’d had very good Revontulet for three of the last four nights. Last night however the sky was blank.

“But this is a good time of year for them?” I ask.

“Oh yes, maybe tonight you will be lucky.”

We toasted each other with Aurora Borealis, the house cocktail, and ate reindeer and king crab – a massive ugly thing that has migrated from Kamkatchka to Norwegian waters. Then John and I went to bed half-dressed and I set the alarm for 11pm. As soon as it beeped I rushed to our balcony but there was nothing. Just a light blue glow in the sky which may have been a moon hiding below the horizon. I went downstairs to ask the nice motherly receptionist if the Northern Lights had been spotted yet. She said that she would ring me if they were. “It’s what I do for our Japanese guests.”

The next morning I woke to a beautiful bright snowscape outside our window and a sense of disappointment. John was already watching a DVD.

“Maybe you will be luckier tonight,” the manager cried over to us as we arrived for breakfast. “It is going to be very cold. Good for Northern Lights.”

Of course this left us with a whole day and nothing much to do. We’d come for the nights. This was a problem I hadn’t anticipated. So we dressed up, browsed the shops, which didn’t take long as Sariselka is in a national park and development is minimal. After pulling John away from a shop selling 12” Sami knives all that was left to see was the modern log church. Oh dear. Clearly the only way to measure out the time until tonight was activity. On offer we found snow-shoeing, skiing down what passes for a ski slope in Finland (but would just be the climb back to your hotel in Austria) and snowmobiling. Not surprisingly we ended up with the environmentally unfriendly option. Now that John is 16 he finally got to drive and I got to scream from the pillion like the world’s most terrified parent. When it was finally over John admitted that because of his helmet he hadn’t heard a single instruction I was yelling. So he’d slowed down on corners because he actually realised it was dangerous to take them fast… wow.

That night we ate more king crab and I drank too many Aurora Borealises so it was John who briefed the receptionist about ringing us at the faintest glimmer in the sky, even if it was only an American spy satellite.

I woke the next morning to beautiful sunshine and a hangover. The receptionist shrugged her shoulders and tried a smile.

“They say we see Northern Lights here 200 days a year.”

" That leaves 165 when we don’t,” I replied.

The Arctic Circle is one hell of a way to go for a no-show. I saw the Japanese were already queuing up for snowmobiles. Maybe I could borrow the DVD player for a while.

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