I have never been so grateful for a cup of tea in my entire life. After six hours of driving from Salzburg, a wrong turn that took me through what I can only describe as a goat's personal driveway, and one spectacularly ill-judged attempt to overtake a tractor on a hairpin bend, I finally pulled up at the holiday home in Altaussee. It was mid-December, and Styria had done what Styria does best in winter: turned itself into something from the front of a chocolate box. Snow everywhere. Proper snow, the kind that crunches satisfyingly under your boots and makes everything look faintly magical, even a woman sitting in a Fiat 500 who has just spent twenty minutes reversing down a mountain lane because she refused to admit the sat nav had given up on her.

The property sat just above the village, wooden and traditional and faintly smug-looking, as if it knew perfectly well how picturesque it was being. I unloaded my bags with the frantic energy of someone who has been sitting too long and whose circulation is staging a minor protest. The cold hit me properly then, that particular alpine cold that somehow feels cleaner than British winter, more purposeful. It does not mess about. It announces itself. My fingers went numb within seconds of removing my gloves to find the key safe code, which I had of course written on my phone, which of course had died somewhere around Liezen.

I let myself in and stood in the hallway, breathing out clouds and realising I had left my proper coat in the car. Classic. The house smelled of pine and something else, something warm and slightly sweet that I later discovered was the wood burner in the living room, still radiating heat from whoever had prepared the place. I shuffled through to the kitchen in my inadequate jacket and put the kettle on with the solemnity of a religious ritual. The windows had steamed up already, the temperature difference between inside and out doing its work. I wiped a circle clear with my sleeve and looked out at the garden, blanketed now, the mountains beyond it disappearing into low grey cloud.

That first evening, I did almost nothing. This is worth noting because I am usually someone who arrives somewhere and immediately needs to walk, explore, establish my territory like an anxious cat. But December in Altaussee does something to your ambition. The daylight had already begun its retreat by half past three, that strange compressed winter light that makes four o'clock feel like evening and six o'clock feel like midnight. I found some biscuits in a tin, made more tea, and sat in the dimming room with the wood burner ticking and settling. The snow had started again, silently, the kind of snowfall that seems almost apologetic, as if it knows it is adding to an already excessive situation.

I thought about going out for dinner, to one of the village restaurants I had read about, places serving the heavy Styrian food that makes sense in this weather. But the darkness outside felt absolute now, and my car and I had been through enough together for one day. I made pasta with butter and cheese, which felt like either the height of self-care or the depths of laziness, and ate it looking at the snow mounting on the windowsill. The season had already decided things for me. There would be no grand exploring tonight, no establishing of territory. There would be early sleep, thick duvet, the particular silence that comes when snow absorbs sound.

I woke once in the night, disoriented by the darkness, and pulled back the curtain to find the cloud had cleared and the mountains were visible in moonlight, transformed into something almost frightening in their scale and stillness. I stood there in my socks, cold radiating through the glass, and felt something I rarely feel on holiday: smallness. Not the unpleasant kind, but the useful kind, the kind that puts your wrong turns and your dead phone and your pasta dinner into some sort of perspective.

The next morning I would walk down to the lake, frozen at the edges now, and begin to understand the place properly. But that first night, that first impression, belonged entirely to the season. Winter in Altaussee does not invite you in gently. It surrounds you, it quietens you, and if you are lucky, it gives you just enough time to catch your breath before it shows you what it has been keeping back.