I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I tried to unlock the wrong cabin. There we were, my partner and I, standing on the steps of what I was absolutely certain was our Rendalen retreat, jiggling a key that stubbornly refused to turn, while inside a very confused Norwegian cat pressed its face against the glass and meowed what I can only assume was the feline equivalent of "who are these idiots." Turns out our actual place was fifty metres further down the gravel track, hidden behind a bend and a rather strategic clump of birch trees. The neighbours, I later learned, still tell this story at dinner parties.

The drive from Oslo had been straightforward enough, a gentle unfolding of green valleys and pine-clad hills that made the M25 feel like a distant fever dream. We stopped once for petrol and what I optimistically called "provisions" but was mostly just brown cheese and a suspicious quantity of crisps. The final stretch into Hedmark county narrowed to a single-track road where the only traffic jam was a family of sheep who regarded our hire car with the contempt it probably deserved.

Arriving properly this time, the cabin sat low against the hillside, red-painted and unassuming, with a deck that caught the afternoon sun like it had been waiting specifically for our pale British complexions. I remember standing there with my bag still on my shoulder, suddenly aware of how loud silence could be. Not the awkward kind, but the generous sort that lets you hear a river somewhere below and nothing else whatsoever.

The first evening, we did almost nothing. This became the pattern, and I am not ashamed. We unpacked at a glacial pace, made tea with water that tasted of mountain, and sat on those weathered wooden chairs watching the light change across the valley. My partner read three chapters of a novel and fell asleep with it open on her chest. I attempted a crossword and gave up when I realised I had been staring at the same clue for twenty minutes, distracted by a butterfly that seemed determined to land on my knee.

The days that followed settled into a rhythm so gentle it barely qualified as rhythm at all. Morning coffee on the deck, watching mist lift from the lower fields. A slow walk to the nearby river, where we found a spot flat enough for sitting and threw stones with the athletic incompetence of people who have forgotten how. Back for lunch, which stretched into afternoon reading in the patch of sunlight that moved across the living room floor like a lazy sundial. Sometimes I would look up from my book and simply watch the trees move, which sounds like the kind of thing people only do in films about nervous breakdowns, but was actually rather wonderful.

We did explore, but locally and without ambition. A village shop where an elderly woman explained, mostly through gestures, that the brown cheese was better than the other brown cheese. A short trail through birch forest that left us pleasantly lost for twenty minutes until we recognised our own footprints. The river again, always the river, with its comforting rush and its complete indifference to our presence.

I had packed with such intention, filling the car with walking boots and rain gear and what I imagined were "essential" activities. Most remained untouched in the hallway. There is something humbling about realising how little you actually need to be content, and something quietly comic about the human instinct to overprepare for peace itself.

On our final morning, I sat with my coffee and watched the same valley I had watched for days, and it looked completely different in the early light. I felt no urge to photograph it, which for me is almost unprecedented. Some things, I suppose, you simply let happen to you.

We locked the correct door, waved at the cat's window in passing, and drove away slowly, as if the road itself might not mind our lingering.