I have never been brilliant with directions, which is how I found myself standing in a Sjusjoen car park at half past two in the afternoon, arguing with a sat nav that had apparently given up on me entirely. Three hours earlier I had been at Oslo Airport feeling terribly organised, and now I was staring at a map on my phone that seemed to suggest my holiday cottage was somewhere inside a fjord. It was not. It was, in fact, about two hundred metres behind me, hidden by a rather smug-looking stand of birch trees. I trudged back with my wheelie case bouncing awkwardly over the gravel, feeling very much like a city person who had forgotten how the countryside works.

The cottage itself made up for every moment of that mild humiliation. A proper wooden hytte with red paint and white trim, the sort you see on postcards and assume cannot possibly be real. I pushed open the door and was hit by that particular smell of pine and old fireplaces and something else I could not identify but immediately wanted to bottle. The living room had enormous windows facing south, and the late afternoon sun was pouring in so aggressively that I had to squint. I dumped my case in the middle of the floor, found the nearest chair, and simply sat there for twenty minutes doing absolutely nothing. This became something of a theme.

The next morning I woke to the kind of sunshine that makes a mockery of every grey British summer I have ever endured. I made coffee in the small kitchen, carried it outside in my socks, and settled onto the wooden deck with a book I had been pretending to read since March. The truth is I managed about four pages in an hour because I kept getting distracted by the light moving across the trees, by a red squirrel having what I can only describe as an episode near the bird feeder, and by the profound realisation that I had absolutely nowhere to be. It was glorious.

My ambitions for the week were deliberately minimal. I walked to the nearby Sjusjoen lake one morning, a gentle twenty-minute stroll that felt like entering a different world. The water was so still it seemed almost rude to disturb it, so I sat on a rock and did not. Another day I cycled to the local shop, which sounds more energetic than it was. The bike had slightly spongy brakes and a basket that squeaked, and I spent most of the journey freewheeling downhill with my feet out like a child. I bought bread and brown cheese and something called kvarg that I still cannot properly describe, then cycled back even more slowly than I came.

The afternoons became a ritual of displacement. I would start on the deck with my book, migrate to the grass when the sun moved, retreat inside when it got too warm, then find myself back outside by early evening with a glass of something cold. I spoke to almost no one. I answered no emails. I watched the light change over the hills and realised, with the gentle embarrassment of someone who should have known this already, how much of my normal life is spent preparing to live rather than actually living.

On my final morning I packed with the same chaotic energy I had arrived with, though this time I knew exactly where I was going. The sat nav behaved itself all the way to the airport. I suspect it knew better than to interrupt a good thing.