I have never been so grateful for heated seats as I was driving up to Tempelseter last October. My mate Dave and I had decided to "do Norway properly," which in our case meant hiring the smallest car imaginable and packing as if we were off to the Arctic rather than Buskerud. Three hours out of Oslo, already running late because I had confidently led us to the wrong fjord, we hit the first proper snow of the season. Dave, who had insisted on bringing shorts "just in case," sat in silence as the temperature dropped and the windscreen wipers made that awful squeaking noise that suggests imminent mechanical death.

The mishap, though. I need to tell you about the mishap. We had stopped at a petrol station near Hemsedal to buy what I believed were essential supplies: two tubes of Pringles, a block of brown cheese I did not understand, and a bottle of something called "sportskvass." In my enthusiasm, I managed to drop the entire bag on my foot, then trip over a parking bollard while trying to hop about dramatically. A very polite Norwegian family watched the whole performance. The father gave me a thumbs up. I have never felt more British.

By the time we wound up the track to Tempelseter, darkness had fallen properly and the snow was doing that thing where it falls sideways rather than down. The cabin sat there like something from a storybook, all timber and warm light, smoke curling from a chimney I would later learn I had absolutely no idea how to manage properly. We stumbled out of the car into air so cold it felt almost solid, grabbed our bags, and immediately discovered that Dave had packed his hiking boots but forgotten any actual socks. October in the Norwegian mountains, and the man had no socks. I laughed so hard I got the hiccups.

Inside, the cabin swallowed us whole. The smell was immediate and wonderful: pine, woodsmoke, something faintly of cinnamon from a previous guest's baking perhaps. The darkness outside seemed to press against the windows, making the place feel like a ship at sea rather than a mountain cabin. We could hear the wind moving through the trees, a sound so different from the traffic and sirens of home that I stood there for a moment just listening, hiccups finally subsiding.

The seasonal shift was everything. This was not the Norway of midnight sun and hiking trails. This was the threshold time, the moment when the mountains decide winter is coming and everyone else had best adjust their expectations accordingly. The tourist season had ended; we passed no other cars on the final stretch, saw no lights from neighbouring properties. The darkness felt generous rather than oppressive, offering permission to do very little, to move slowly, to exist without the constant low-grade performance of being a tourist.

I built a fire with the confidence of a man who had watched perhaps four YouTube videos on the subject. It smoked. It went out. Dave, still in his inadequate footwear, read the cabin's manual with the serious expression of someone studying for an exam. Eventually we produced something approximating warmth, though the process involved far more newspaper than I care to admit and one moment of genuine panic involving a poker and what I thought was a spark but turned out to be my own reflection in the glass.

That first evening, we sat with our Pringles and our mysterious cheese and watched snow accumulate against the window. The sportskvass remained unopened, suspect. Somewhere outside, an animal moved through the trees, sounding enormous in the silence. We looked at each other like children who had been allowed to stay up too late, giddy with the strangeness of where we found ourselves.

I keep thinking about that arrival, about how the season had already transformed the landscape into something that demanded a different kind of attention. There was no pretending we could simply arrive and consume the place. The weather, the darkness, the cold, they all required something from us: preparation, humility, a willingness to be slightly rubbish at things and laugh about it afterwards. The cabin was warm, eventually. The cheese was odd but grew on me. Dave wore two pairs of my socks for the entire week and never once complained.

The snow kept falling. We kept not quite managing the fire. It was perfect, in its ridiculous way, and I would do it all again tomorrow, bollard and all.