Getting to Lakselv in Finnmark was always going to be an adventure, though I had not quite bargained for my suitcase deciding to start its own. Somewhere between Oslo and Alta, the wretched thing developed a wheel that spun with all the enthusiasm of a lazy Susan at a particularly dull dinner party. By the time I collected it at the carousel, it was listing like a drunken sailor, and I spent the final leg of the journey dragging it through snow-dusted car parks with what I can only describe as theatrical exasperation. My children found this hilarious, of course. My partner filmed it. I am apparently now a TikTok star in a very small, very northern Norwegian community.

We had hired a car for the run from Alta to Lakselv, winding through landscapes that made my usual commute through suburban roundabouts feel faintly ridiculous. The light up here in late autumn has a quality I cannot quite describe, thin and golden and somehow expectant, as though the sky itself is not sure whether to bother with full daylight or simply give up and head straight for twilight. Trees grew sparser, the ground grew whiter, and my daughter asked approximately every four minutes whether we would see reindeer. I said probably not. We saw seven, including one that stood in the road with the entitled attitude of a creature that absolutely knows it has right of way.

The cottage sat at the edge of things, which is precisely where you want a cottage to be. I had worried it might feel too isolated, too bleak, too much like one of those architectural decisions you regret after dark. But pulling up the gravel track, what struck me first was how immediately it felt like somewhere you could exhale. Red wooden walls, a proper pitched roof for shedding snow, windows that caught the last of that strange northern light and held it. The surrounding birch trees were bare and silver, and beyond them the land opened out towards the Porsangerfjorden with the casual generosity of somewhere that has never needed to try very hard to impress anyone.

Inside smelled of pine and something else I could not place, something clean and cold that had somehow got in and decided to stay. The living area was simple, uncluttered, the sort of space that makes you realise how much nonsense you live with at home. My son immediately claimed the loft bedroom, my daughter sulked because she had wanted it, and my partner began investigating the kitchen with the focused intensity of someone who takes holiday catering very seriously indeed. I stood by the window with a cup of tea that tasted better than tea has any right to taste, watching the light fade and feeling something in my shoulders that I had not even noticed was tight begin, very slowly, to loosen.

The funny thing about arriving somewhere properly quiet is how noisy your own head turns out to be. For the first hour I kept thinking I should be doing something, checking something, planning the next thing. The cottage just sat there, indifferent to my restlessness. There was wood to stack if I wanted it, a path down towards the water if I felt ambitious, a deck where I could stand and pretend to be the sort of person who regularly communes with nature. Mostly I just stood there, still in my coat, still slightly aware of my ridiculous suitcase in the car boot, and let the stillness do whatever it was going to do.

By evening the children had stopped bickering and were constructing some elaborate game involving the birch trees and rules I did not understand. My partner produced a stew that made the whole place smell like somewhere you would want to be in February. I found the sauna, because of course there was a sauna, and sat in it for longer than was probably sensible, watching steam rise and thinking about nothing much at all.

That first night I slept better than I had in months, the darkness up here being a different creature entirely from the sodium-tinted version at home. No planes, no traffic, no distant hum of a city that never quite stops. Just silence, and the occasional creak of wood settling in the cold, and the certain knowledge that tomorrow would bring much of the same, and that this was not a problem to be solved but a pleasure to be slowly, deliberately inhabited.

I woke to my daughter whispering that she had seen a fox. I did not know if this was true. I chose to believe it anyway.