The SatNav had been insisting we turn left into a fjord for the better part of twenty minutes, and my partner's faith in technology was crumbling faster than a packet of digestives in a downpour. "Recalculating," it chirped, as if that word had ever solved anything. We'd already missed the turning for Son twice, once because I was distracted by a red wooden barn that looked impossibly picturesque, and once because a tractor the size of a small flat had blocked the lane while its owner had what appeared to be a full mobile phone conversation without moving an inch.

By the time we rolled up to the Son/Vestby holiday home, I had that particular brand of British exhaustion that comes from pretending everything's fine while quietly fearing you've driven to Sweden by accident. The property sat there, all timber cladding and sensible Norwegian practicality, with a view across the Oslofjord that made me immediately forget I'd been swearing at a Garmin for an hour.

Our first proper introduction to local life came within minutes of unloading the car. A chap called Per appeared from next door, apparently drawn by the unmistakable sound of a British person struggling with a wheelie suitcase on gravel. He was seventy if he was a day, wearing a woollen jumper that had seen at least three decades of faithful service, and he spoke English with the careful precision of someone who'd learned it primarily from watching detective dramas.

"You have come for the peace," he announced, which felt less like a question and more like a diagnosis.

I admitted we had, and he nodded sagely, as if this confirmed something he'd long suspected about British people. He then spent ten minutes explaining the bin system with a level of detail I have never before encountered in my life. Three bins, four if you counted the compost, and woe betide anyone who put plastic in the wrong one. "The council," he said, lowering his voice, "they have cameras." I still don't know if he was joking.

The next character to materialise was his wife, Gudrun, who arrived bearing a Tupperware of something she called "welcome waffles" and a look that suggested she was already mentally cataloguing our failings. She was tiny and formidable, the sort of woman who could probably fell a tree while discussing the weather. The waffles were extraordinary, still warm, with a heart-shaped pattern that I later learned was the traditional Norwegian way and not, as I'd initially assumed, a personal message of affection.

"You will go to the shop in Vestby," she said, making it sound like a pilgrimage. "Not the big one. The small one. Hanne is there. She knows everything."

She wasn't wrong. The small shop in Vestby, which I would have driven past without a second glance, turned out to be the social hub of what felt like the entire municipality. Hanne herself was behind the counter, a woman with reading glasses on a chain and an encyclopaedic knowledge of who was staying where and for how long. I bought milk and left forty minutes later with a handwritten list of swimming spots, a warning about the wasp nest near the old pier, and an invitation to a neighbourhood coffee morning I had no memory of accepting.

"Per says you are funny," Hanne announced as I was leaving, which I chose to take as a compliment though the context remained mysterious.

Back at the property, I sat on the terrace with a cup of tea that tasted slightly of the local water's mineral content and watched a ferry drift across the fjord. The mishap with the SatNav already felt like a story from someone else's holiday, something I'd trot out at dinner parties for years. The timber walls creaked occasionally, settling into evening, and somewhere a dog barked with the relaxed rhythm of a creature that had never known a city.

I thought about Hanne's coffee morning invitation and felt a flutter of that particular social anxiety that comes from being the foreigner in a small place. Would there be more waffles? Would I be expected to explain Brexit? Would Per reveal that he'd been testing me with the bin lecture, that there was some deeper Norwegian integration exam I'd already failed?

The light was doing that extraordinary Scandinavian thing where everything turns golden and significant, and I realised I was grinning like an idiot at absolutely nothing. We'd been in the country six hours, got lost, been mildly terrorised by recycling regulations, and adopted by strangers with Tupperware. This, I decided, was exactly the sort of holiday I hadn't known I needed.

My partner emerged with two glasses of something local and fizzy, and we sat there watching the fjord settle into stillness. Tomorrow there would be swimming, and possibly that coffee morning, and almost certainly another encounter with Per who would, I suspected, find something else about our presence that required his intervention. For now, though, there was just this view, these peculiar generous strangers, and the particular peace of having absolutely no idea what came next.