I have never been quite so grateful for heated seats as I was driving up to Engerdal last February. My partner and I had flown into Oslo, picked up a hire car that smelled faintly of fish and optimism, and set off north into Hedmark with the sort of naive confidence that only comes from having watched one too many Nordic noir box sets. We were headed for a cabin near Lake Femunden, which sounded romantic in the brochure and rather more daunting when the snow started coming down sideways somewhere past Elverum.

The mishap, because there is always a mishap, occurred at a petrol station in Trysil. I had popped inside for coffee and what I can only describe as a regrettable hot dog, leaving my partner in charge of refuelling. When I emerged, he was standing beside the car with an expression I have learned to recognise as the one that precedes expensive phone calls. He had filled the diesel tank, which would have been fine, had our vehicle not been petrol. There we were, two Brits in matching puffa jackets, blocking a pump in rural Norway while snow accumulated on our windscreen wipers and our dignity.

Three hours, one tow truck, and a very patient mechanic named Bjorn later, we were mobile again and significantly poorer. The light was fading by the time we reached Engerdal proper, that particular Arctic dusk that makes everything feel slightly unreal, as though you have stumbled into a photograph before the colours have fully developed.

The cabin sat perhaps two hundred metres from the frozen lake, and I shall never forget opening the car door and hearing absolutely nothing. Not the muffled hush of English countryside snow, but a profound, ringing silence that made my ears strain for something that was not there. The cold, I should mention, was not the damp sort that creeps through your clothes back home. This was a dry, brilliant cold that snapped at your cheeks and made every breath feel like a small achievement.

Our first task was lighting the wood burner, which we accomplished with the competence of people who have read instructions but never actually handled kindling. The cabin warmed slowly, reluctantly even, and I found myself pacing between rooms in my coat and hat, checking radiators as though they might be hiding warmth from me out of spite. By nine o'clock, the temperature had shifted from "potential hypothermia" to "merely brisk," and we celebrated with wine that we had chilled simply by leaving it on the kitchen counter.

What struck me most about that first evening was how completely the season had transformed ordinary things. The windows, which in summer would have framed green slopes and blue water, now held only darkness and the occasional ghostly swirl of snow. We could not see the lake at all, yet we knew it was there, frozen and waiting, because the silence had a particular quality that open water never produces. Even the cabin itself felt different than it would in July. The wooden walls seemed to contract slightly, holding themselves tight against the cold outside. The light switches were stiff. The floorboards creaked with a sharper, more brittle note.

I woke around four in the morning, which is not unusual for me in unfamiliar places, and stood by the bedroom window in my socks. The snow had stopped, and in the moonlight the landscape had become almost unbearably beautiful. The lake was a vast white plain, the distant trees black strokes against grey hills, and I felt something complicated settle in my chest. It was partly the grandeur of it, I think, and partly the smallness it made me feel, and partly something else that I am still not quite able to name.

We had come to Engerdal seeking something we could not articulate, the way people do when they book cabins in foreign countries in the depths of winter. What we found, that first night, was a particular kind of isolation that felt less like loneliness and more like being properly alone for the first time in years. The season demanded things of us. It demanded that we move more slowly, plan more carefully, pay closer attention to the mechanics of staying warm and fed and sane. There was no scrolling through phones on the deck, no lazy swimming, no midnight sun to disorient your body clock. Just the dark, and the cold, and the necessary business of getting through until morning.

I stood there until my feet went numb against the floorboards, then crept back to bed and woke my partner accidentally by being too careful not to wake him. He grumbled something unintelligible and pulled me under the duvet, and I fell asleep with the image of that frozen landscape still glowing behind my eyelids.

The next morning, we would attempt snowshoeing and I would fall over more times than I care to recount. We would meet the neighbour, a retired fisherman who kept his boat in a shed and spoke about the lake as though it were a person he had known for decades. We would learn to love the sauna, and to fear the moment of stepping out of it into air that felt like a physical blow. But all of that came later. That first night was simply about arrival, about the particular shock of finding yourself somewhere that the season has made entirely its own.

I still think about that silence sometimes, when London traffic is particularly insistent or my neighbour's television bleeds through the wall. I think about how completely the world can change when you let winter have its way with a place, and how small and fortunate you can feel, standing in your socks at four in the morning, watching snow settle on a lake you cannot see.