I'd never driven on snow before, which is how I ended up doing a very slow, very embarrassing 360-degree spin in a petrol station forecourt just outside Lillehammer. My wife was gripping her seat, the kids were cheering like we were at Alton Towers, and a Norwegian man in a Volvo watched with the kind of patient expression that suggested he'd seen this dozens of times. I gave him a thumbs up. He did not return it.

Three hours earlier we'd landed at Oslo, picked up a car with winter tyres that I now deeply appreciated, and headed north towards Hedmark. The plan was simple: a week in a proper Norwegian hytte, somewhere to slow down and do very little with any great enthusiasm. Sjusjoen kept appearing on my research as a cross-country skiing hub, which meant nothing to me since my only skiing experience involved a dry slope in Stoke and a twisted ankle. Still, the photos showed red wooden houses against white hills, and that was enough.

The final approach took us through pine forests so heavy with snow they looked like iced cakes. My daughter announced she needed a wee for the fourth time. My son asked if there would be Wi-Fi. I concentrated on not reenacting my petrol station ballet on these narrower roads. Then the satnav announced we'd arrived, and there it was: our little red cottage, huddled amongst similar red cottages, smoke curling from a neighbour's chimney, everything utterly still except for our car engine and my daughter's continued complaints.

The key was in a lockbox, which I fumbled with for several minutes because my fingers had gone numb despite my Yorkshire-bought gloves that had clearly never met proper cold. The door opened onto warmth and that particular smell of wood and old holiday cushions. The kids bolted past me, claiming bedrooms with the territorial urgency of colonial powers. My wife and I stood in the small kitchen-living area and just breathed. It was compact, slightly dated, completely unpretentious. Exactly right.

I made tea with a kettle that took approximately one geological age to boil, while my wife investigated the wood-burning stove with the focused attention of someone defusing a bomb. Neither of us had operated one before. There were instructions in Norwegian, German, and what I think was Danish. We opened the door, peered inside, closed it again. The kids had already found the television and were watching something in Norwegian that seemed to involve a lot of shouting and baking.

Within an hour I'd established that I was spectacularly bad at reading Norwegian appliance labels and that the shower required a particular sequence of knob-turning that felt more like launching a missile. My wife, meanwhile, had got the stove going through a combination of intuition and luck, and the cottage began to feel properly lived-in. We ate supermarket bread and cheese for dinner because the local shop had closed at four, and because we were too tired for the restaurant at the nearby hotel. Nobody minded.

That first evening, the four of us sat around the stove with hot chocolate from a powder that claimed to be premium, playing cards with a deck we'd found in a drawer. Outside, the snow had started again, falling past the windows without sound. My son beat me at rummy twice and was insufferable about it. My daughter fell asleep on the sofa with chocolate on her chin. I kept getting up to look out at the darkness, at the snow settling on the cottage roofs, at the complete absence of anything urgent or demanding.

The petrol station spin felt like it had happened to someone else, or in another life. Here, the only thing requiring my immediate attention was whether to add another log to the fire. I added the log. It felt like the most important decision I'd made all year.