Andy Richardson: Early morning nirvana was perfect Finnish

Charlotte looked at me. "Where do you think he is?"

I pulled my blank face; the one I use when the bank manager asks me if I remember spending £345 on non-essential reindeer rugs and becoming overdrawn. "No idea."

Nick had last been seen six hours earlier. The award-winning chef – whose name, just like Charlotte's, has been changed – had been in sparkling form. He'd cooked an exquisite dinner from rainbow trout, sturgeon and beluga, demonstrating dizzying skills during an evening of food, drink and riotous conversation.

He'd been seated opposite a self-proclaimed anti-millionaire, who'd just invested six million euros in a new spa on a vast and exclusive holiday complex.

"I owe millions," he laughed. He also owned a vast forest and welcomed 130,000 affluent visitors each year. The sums would have more than balanced themselves out. Self-deprecation was his thing.

But at 8am on a stressful Friday morning, Nick was our problem.

We knocked on his door.

Then we hammered.

Nothing.

Even hung-over chefs who've been necking bottles of red after drinking Finnish wheat beers and cans of Murphy's don't sleep through the sort of noise we were making on his door.

And then I went in, switched the light on and found an empty room. Damn. Five hours to take off. And no sign of Nick.

Later, Nick told us what he'd done.

At 3am, two hours after he'd gone to his room, he'd decided to explore. The other guests in our five-room lodge were sound asleep and the devil on Nick's shoulder told him it would be 'interesting' to look at the spare room to see what it was like.

So he'd padded along the landing, picked up the card key and discovered that it was better than his. And what's a man to do at 3am in a drunken Finnish morning when he has the choice between:

a) Four hours of sleep prior to a long drive to the airport, or,

b) Relocating to a different room so that he can drink more red wine, spend an hour warming up the sauna and then relax through a sleepless, rock'n'roll night after a two-day road trip.

I'm guessing Nick had read William Blake. And I'm guessing he'd memorised a passage from Proverbs From Hell that says: "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. . . You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough."

And between 3am and 4am in a Finnish sauna, glass of red wine in hand, he created his own palace of wisdom, finding out what was more than enough. Hic.

The next morning, Charlotte and I kept cool as we entered Nick's empty room.

Doomsday scenarios flashed through our minds. He'd spoken about how much he loved Finland, so maybe he'd decided to pack his bags during the night and wander off into the woods, to avoid coming home. But if that was true, what should Charlotte and I do? Should we leave him in the woods and drive to the airport, then home. Or should we send out a search party, miss our flight and end up stranded in Finland? It was our own version of Touching The Void. The question was simple: should we cut the rope?

And then instinct took over. And I opened the door to the spare room, just in case. Nick was fast asleep.

"Dude, you're late."

"Two minutes," he lied, through an aching head and dry mouth. Jack Kerouac would have been proud.

We made the plane. There were no dramas and no delays as Charlotte got the performance of a Bugatti Veyron from her humble four-by-four. Later, Nick apologised. "Sorry I was late."

We laughed. We were just relieved to be on the plane and we'd had such a good two days in Finland that an hour of early morning stress seemed like a small price to pay.

And then he laughed right back. "Mind you, it felt fantastic to be in a Finnish sauna with a glass of red when the whole world was sleeping." It probably did. And we had to admire his chutzpah.

In Finland, there's a saying: "All of the important decisions are made in the sauna."

Politicians, movers and shakers and ordinary Joes chat and make decisions surrounded by steam and the smells of fresh birch and natural tar.

Nick had found his nirvana in just such a place.

In the film Furious 7, Wiz Khalifa and Iggy Azalea decreed the only way to live: Go hard or go home.

In Finland, we'd gone hard. And now it was time to go home.