‘Other countries have saunas, but nowhere has sauna culture like here in Finland. Elsewhere it’s a business model: in Finland it’s a way of life,’ says Alexander Markus Lembke, sitting in the yard outside the sauna where he works in Tampere, the Nordic nation’s second city and self-proclaimed ‘sauna capital of the world.’

It’s seven in the evening, early July, and I’m sitting on a jetty on the edge of a lake in eastern Finland, dressed only in a towel around my waist. Occasionally an agreeable waft of birch wood smoke drifts over my head from the sauna, located at the top of a short flight of wooden steps. The lake is settling into a glassy mirror, but the sun is still high in the warm northern sky.

I’m looking out of my window in Helsinki just after Christmas at a fabulous frost-bound fantasy. The boughs of the birch tree in our yard are drooping under heavy snow and a knee-deep carpet of white extends to the street. An enormous hare, its fur turned seasonally pale, is nibbling at the seeds I’ve scattered for the birds.