The trouble started before I even set foot in the thing. I'd been driving up from Alta airport, which is a journey that deserves its own paragraph really, winding through terrain so stark and beautiful you keep thinking someone's switched your life to a Nordic noir box set. I'd booked this place called Aroya Alta, a proper wooden cabin affair up in Finnmark, and I was already picturing myself as some sort of seasoned Arctic explorer. The reality, as ever, was rather more pathetic.

I pulled up at the cabin, grabbed what I thought was my rucksack from the boot, and promptly dropped an entire bag of frozen prawns onto the gravel. They'd slid out from somewhere under the seat, presumably from a previous tenant's fishing trip, and there I was, on my hands and knees in minus whatever-it-was, chasing prawns round a hire car like the world's most desperate seafood salesman. A woman appeared from the neighbouring cabin, watched me for a solid minute, then said, "First time?" in that flat, knowing way Norwegians have. I admitted it was. She nodded, picked up a prawn that had rolled near her boot, and handed it back without another word. I later learned this was Ingrid, and that she would become the absolute centre of my entire holiday.

The cabin itself was gorgeous in that utterly practical Scandinavian way, all wood and warmth and windows that made you feel like you were living inside a snow globe. But I barely noticed, because Ingrid had already wandered off toward the shared drying room, and I was desperate to know what her story was. I found her hanging up what looked like an extraordinary number of woollen socks. "My husband's," she said, before I asked. "He thinks he needs twelve pairs for a weekend. He's inside, complaining about the coffee." She said this with evident satisfaction.

I met the husband, Bjorn, the following morning. He emerged from their cabin holding a mug like it owed him money, introduced himself with a grunt that somehow conveyed both suspicion and welcome, and immediately asked if I knew anything about snowmobiles. I do not. This delighted him. "Good," he said. "Everyone here thinks they know something about snowmobiles. You are already better than most." He then spent forty minutes explaining precisely why he no longer trusted his own snowmobile, a 2012 model with what he called "a personality," which apparently meant it broke down exclusively in places with no phone signal. Ingrid appeared midway through this lecture with more coffee and a look that suggested she'd heard this exact monologue approximately four hundred times.

The real character, though, was the man who turned up that afternoon to check the property's water system. His name was Einar, he was approximately seventy, and he arrived on skis despite there being a perfectly serviceable path. "The path is for summer," he said, when I mentioned it. He then spent an hour inside the cabin's utility room, emerging periodically to announce cryptic things like "the pressure is philosophical" and "your pipes are optimistic." I never fully understood whether this meant everything was fine or about to explode. Ingrid translated later: Einar had fixed something, thought the rest would hold, and had taken a particular liking to me because I'd offered him a biscuit. "He doesn't get biscuits at home," she explained. "His wife is very healthy."

By the second evening, I'd somehow been absorbed into their orbit entirely. Bjorn had decided I needed to learn proper fire-building, which involved a lot of dramatic gestures and muttered complaints about "tourist methods." Ingrid produced a flask of something that burned going down and made the northern lights, when they eventually appeared, seem personally arranged for our entertainment. Einar returned, without skis this time, to announce that the philosophical pressure had held, and accepted another biscuit with the gravity of a state occasion.

I came to Finnmark expecting isolation and wilderness, which I got, in abundance. What I hadn't expected was this peculiar, wonderful little community of people who seemed to have decided that my incompetence was charming rather than irritating. There's something deeply humbling about being the useless one in a group of practical, capable people, and something deeply comforting too. They didn't need me to be anything other than exactly what I was: a prawn-dropping idiot with questions about snowmobiles and a decent supply of biscuits.

I left after a week, slightly heavier from Ingrid's cooking, slightly wiser about fire construction, and with Einar's phone number scrawled on a bit of paper in case the pressure ever became too philosophical again. The prawns, incidentally, went in the bin. Some things are beyond saving.