I have never been so grateful to see a wooden cabin in my entire life. After six hours of driving from Oslo, a wrong turn that took us through what I am fairly certain was someone's private farm, and an argument with a sat nav that appeared to be having some sort of existential crisis, we finally spotted the Hogevarde. I promptly got out of the car, stretched my legs, and walked straight into a low-hanging branch. Welcome to Buskerud.

The thing about a Norwegian mountain cabin is that it does not care about your dignity. It simply waits for you, weathered and unbothered, while you flail about in the driveway clutching your forehead. My partner found this absolutely hilarious, of course, filming my dismount for posterity while I muttered something about concussions and litigation. But then I turned around and actually looked at the place, and the branch incident faded into something I would laugh about later. Much later.

The Hogevarde sits in that particular Norwegian way, neither imposing nor humble, just perfectly settled into the landscape as if it grew there. The timber was silver-grey from years of proper winters, and the windows caught the afternoon light in that manner that makes you want to do absolutely nothing except watch it move across the room. Which, as it turned out, would become my primary activity for the week.

Our first morning, I woke to sunshine pouring through curtains I had forgotten to close. This is not a holiday for the self-improving. There is no early rising for strenuous hikes, no earnest conversations about "making the most of it." I made coffee in the small kitchen, took it outside in my socks despite the morning chill, and simply sat on the wooden deck watching the light change on the hillside opposite. A bird I could not identify made a sound like a small mechanical fault. I did not look it up. This became my policy.

The cabin encourages this approach. There is a small lake perhaps ten minutes' walk away, nothing dramatic, just water and reeds and the occasional fish making itself known with a theatrical splash. I walked there most days with a book I never quite finished, found a flat rock, and read the same paragraph repeatedly while my attention drifted to clouds, to the particular quality of silence, to whether I was getting sunburned. I was, consistently. Norwegian sunshine has a deceptive politeness about it.

My partner developed a routine of their own, involving a slightly wobbly bicycle found in the cabin's small shed and a determination to explore every minor track within reasonable distance. They would return with reports of a stream, a particular view, a dog that followed them for half a mile. I would make appropriate noises of interest and return to my rock. We were both, in our ways, doing very little with tremendous commitment.

There was a village shop perhaps twenty minutes' drive, where I practiced my disastrous Norwegian on a patient woman who eventually took pity and switched to English. I bought bread, cheese, tomatoes, and a chocolate called Kvikk Lunsj that I ate entirely too many of while reading poorly translated detective novels from the cabin's eclectic shelf. The evenings stretched long, the sun reluctant to depart, and we would sit outside with wine that tasted better than its price suggested, watching the sky perform its slow colour changes.

I kept thinking I should plan something. A proper walk, perhaps, or a drive to somewhere noteworthy. But the sunshine kept arriving, and the deck kept being available, and my book kept not being finished, and somehow the week passed in this manner of gentle, deliberate unproductivity. I have never been so rested while doing so little. There is a particular Norwegian word, I am told, for this kind of outdoor living: friluftsliv. I am fairly certain I was doing it incorrectly, too stationary, too absorbed in my own small comforts. I do not care in the slightest.

On our final morning, I walked to the lake one last time. The same fish splashed. The same bird made its mechanical complaint. I sat on my rock and finally finished that paragraph, though I cannot now recall what it said. The sunshine was warm, the kind of warmth that makes closing your eyes feel like the only sensible response. So I did. And when I opened them, I felt something I had not expected from a holiday about nothing in particular: the quiet certainty that I would return, perhaps wiser about low branches, perhaps not, but certainly no more ambitious about what a week in the Norwegian mountains ought to involve.