Past the town's cross-country skiing track, a little further on from an icy-looking pond peppered with hardy ducks, steam was rising from the valley floor. A series of low-rise modern buildings, large windows brightly lit against the surrounding mountains, awaited me, grouped around a striking dome and a simple glass box.

An extraordinary trek on cross-country skis across the Swedish tundra leaves Simon Birch dazzled by the Arctic landscape

With many citizens of the world working hard, perhaps a little too hard, it’s fair to say that some recuperation is much needed and much deserved. The rising popularity of spa breaks as an affordable luxury has seen a huge increase in the number of facilities offering treatments and beauty services. But with so much choice, where is the best place to take your ultimate spa holiday?

Faction Theatre's account of Twelfth Night is terrifically fresh in its stripped-back - not to say, at one point, half-naked - inventiveness.

Lime Wood, Hampshire

"Elegant, interesting and funny," says The Independent quote on the cover, though the hardback review also included the words "oxymoronic" and "limping". Well, this Independent review says: overblown, verbose and unpersuasive.

It's not often that an art installation sets your heart race racing and gets you hot and bothered. But that's something that residents of the Finnish city of Turku are going to have to get used to this summer with the arrival of SaunaLab, four genuine working saunas that also happen to be installation pieces. Dotted around the city and open to the public throughout the summer, the artist-designed saunas were commissioned as part of Turku's tenure as European Capital of Culture 2011 and are intended to update and re-imagine traditional Nordic sauna culture while presenting art to the public in an innovative and unusual way.

There's something about a home sauna that conjures up an era of prawn cocktails, swirly carpets and suburban swingers. Quite why it is that these innocent Nordic heated cabins should inspire such Seventies connotations is a mystery. Of course, there are "those" sorts of saunas – open late in backstreets – but surely we've all been to enough gyms and spas for a post-workout muscle relax, in a no-hint-of-slap-and-tickle environment, to overcome the giggly reactions?