I have never been so relieved to see a wooden cabin in my life, and that includes the time I got caught in a hailstorm near Aviemore and had to shelter in a bothy that smelled strongly of wet dog and regret. The drive up to Hemsedal from Oslo had been straightforward enough, or so I thought, until I confidently turned left where I ought to have turned right and found myself on a road that grew progressively narrower, progressively snowier, and progressively more like a scene from a Scandinavian crime drama where the detective meets an unfortunate end.

My hire car, a sensible Volvo that suddenly felt about as sensible as a rollerskate, slid to an undignified halt outside what I initially assumed was my holiday let. It was not. It was the home of a chap called Geir, who emerged in slippers and a woollen jumper that could have sheltered a small family, looking not remotely surprised to find a confused Englishman blocking his driveway. I wound down my window with what I hoped was an apologetic smile but was probably closer to a grimace of pure social terror.

"You are lost," Geir said. It was not a question.

I admitted this was so. He scratched his beard, which was magnificent and silver and clearly the product of many years of thoughtful consideration. "The English," he said, with the air of someone delivering a weather forecast, "always turn left at the petrol station. Always." He then gave me directions so precise they involved references to specific boulders, a particular bend in the river, and a red house that was "not the first red house, the other red house, the one with the dog that looks like a loaf of bread." I thanked him profusely. He waved this off. "Come for coffee tomorrow," he said. "I will tell you about my brother who went to Birmingham once."

I found the actual cabin shortly after, and it was worth every moment of navigational humiliation. A proper timber construction with a balcony that looked out towards snow-covered slopes, the sort of place that makes you want to put on thick socks and drink something warming from a chipped mug. I was still unpacking when I heard footsteps on the porch and opened the door to find a woman perhaps in her sixties, carrying a Tupperware container and wearing a hat with earflaps.

"I am Ingrid," she announced. "I live in the house with the green door. Geir telephoned me that an Englishman had arrived who could not find his own nose in fog. I have brought you waffles."

These were not mere waffles. They were heart-shaped, still warm, and came with a small pot of homemade cloudberry jam that Ingrid watched me eat with the intensity of a headmistress monitoring a spelling test. I must have passed, because she nodded once, sharply, and informed me that she would be skiing at the Hemsedal Skisenter the following morning and I was welcome to join her if I could keep up, which she clearly doubted.

"I am seventy-three," she added, as if this settled the matter.

I spent my first evening on that balcony, wrapped in a blanket that smelled faintly of woodsmoke, watching the light fade over the valley and feeling something in my chest loosen that I had not realised was tight. There is a particular quality to the quiet in Hemsedal, broken only by the occasional distant sound of a snowmobile or the creak of timber settling in the cold. I thought about Geir and his Birmingham story, about Ingrid's competitive skiing, about how I had arrived expecting solitude and had instead stumbled into something more like community.

The next morning I did attempt to ski with Ingrid. She was, predictably, magnificent. I was, predictably, not. She waited for me at the bottom of each slope with the patience of someone who has watched many incompetents come and go, offering corrections that were blunt but never unkind. "Your knees," she said at one point, "are like a newborn moose. All of them at once, going nowhere."

By the time we parted, she had invited me to a gathering at her neighbour's cabin that evening, a "little thing" that turned out to involve seventeen people, several types of aquavit, and a man called Bjorn who played the accordion with more enthusiasm than skill and told me, at some length, about his theories regarding British tea consumption. I understood perhaps forty percent of his rapid Norwegian, but I laughed when everyone else laughed and nodded when nodding seemed appropriate, and nobody seemed to mind.

That was my first forty-eight hours in Hemsedal. I came for the mountains, which are genuinely spectacular in that understated Nordic way, but I suspect I will remember the people far longer. There is something about small communities in harsh landscapes, some quality of directness and warmth that does not waste time on pretence. Geir's coffee was terrible, incidentally, brewed to a strength that could have stripped paint, but I drank three cups and would have drunk more if offered, because some things matter more than the things themselves.

I am writing this on my third morning, still in my thick socks, with Ingrid's waffles long finished and a fresh pot of something less aggressive than Geir's brew steaming on the table. Outside, the snow is falling again, soft and relentless, and I can hear what might be a snowmobile or might be Bjorn's accordion practice, difficult to tell at this distance. I have been invited to help Geir with something he calls "wood management" this afternoon, which I suspect involves moving logs from one place to another place very similar to the first place, and I find I am looking forward to it with an eagerness that surprises me.

Perhaps that is what happens when you take the wrong turn and end up somewhere you did not plan to be. Perhaps the best directions are the ones given by strangers in slippers, referencing dogs shaped like bread loaves. I came here expecting to be alone with my thoughts, and instead I have been thoroughly, cheerfully, waffle-fed into a community that seems to have decided I am worth the bother, navigational incompetence and all. I am not entirely sure what I did to deserve it, but I am not foolish enough to question good fortune when it arrives wearing earflaps and carrying Tupperware.