Beyond the veranda of the lakeside cottage, a brilliant June sun turns orange then red before it sinks behind the shoreline. Sibelius’s stirring music swells from speakers and a gentle breeze rustles the reeds. Indoors the log fire flickers in the stone hearth. Time to light the wood-burning sauna, accompanied by a tot of Finlandia vodka. After the blast of heat – I manage 12 minutes – I leap naked from the pontoon into Lake Asikkala, a couple of hours north of Helsinki. This is the ‘wahay!’ moment, a sizzling consummation of earth, fire and water. Welcome to the Finnish lifestyle that has seen the Nordic nation come top of a recent World Happiness Index compiled by the UN and designed to quantify that most ethereal of commodities: contentment.
The competition was set up by the General Assembly under Resolution 66/281 and Finland has won six times in the last ten years.
Last time it pipped Denmark into second place, with Iceland, Switzerland and the Netherlands following behind in that order. So is it all it’s cracked up to be? As far as the lakeside cottage is concerned, yes.
And being a big fan of the great Finnish composer, Jean Sibelius, on my second day I leave my charming billet and head back down towards Helsinki for the shores of Lake Tuusula to visit the home of the composer.
It does make me happy being here. So content I can’t help myself and blast out the first few bars of the A minor Impromptu on the Steinway in front of the tiled hearth.
My guide smiles indulgently – happy as well – before continuing her narrative. The fireplace is in Sibelius’s favourite key, she says. ‘He could hear colours in the way that you can see them. To him that shade of green was F major.’
Unusual, perhaps. But Finland seems to be a land of the imagination, where not seeing is part of the picture, where the obvious has been airbrushed from the score. The land where the spirit rules and banality is banished to the sidelines.
Finland’s popularity as a long weekend destination is well established with budget airline connections from the UK. This is, after all, the home of Father Christmas, 187,888 lakes, a current affairs radio channel in Latin and a football league that only plays in swamps.
How could anyone resist? Even in the height of winter. On a previous visit, I had seen a sign at the airport which read: ‘Nobody in their right mind would come to Helsinki in November. Except you, you badass.’ With all due respect, nobody in their right mind would jump into the Baltic through a hole in the ice after a drink-sodden session in the sauna. Or count all those lakes. Or have an Elvis impersonator who sings in Ancient Greek.
But I digress. Back to Sibelius. His home, with its splendid antique sauna, was at the heart of an early 20th-century arts and crafts movement. The Tuusula shoreline is dotted with such grand wooden dachas. All lovely looking, happy-seeming places.
Out on the lake, in an old flat-bottomed fire tender, we glide along the shoreline before alighting at Krapi, a rambling old farm that is now a family-run hotel. Before dinner, I continue my sauna crawl in the hotel’s spacious tiled broilerhouse. ‘Sauna’ is the only Finnish word to have made it into the English language and is a ritual that’s been going on since caveman settlers discovered that hot stones sprinkled with water unclog even the dirtiest pores.
In the past, women gave birth in them because the soot from the traditional smoke sauna was bacteria-resistant, so created a sterile environment.
It is also where the pre-marriage purification ceremony took place and where the dead were washed and prepared for burial.