I have never been so grateful for a thermos of tea in my entire life, and that includes the time I sat through my nephew's three-hour recorder recital. The drive from Oslo to Sjusjoen had been all very scenic and Nordic and whatnot, but somewhere around Hamar I managed to convince myself that I could navigate the final stretch without GPS. Reader, I could not. I ended up on a forestry track so convincingly wrong that a moose stopped chewing to judge me. By the time I found the actual cabin, I had drunk an entire flask of Yorkshire's finest and needed the loo with the urgency of a man who'd been running from his own incompetence for forty minutes.

The cabin itself, when I finally lurched up to it, looked like something from a postcard I'd have sent my gran if she hadn't gone fully digital in 2019. Red timber, white trim, that particular Scandinavian neatness that makes you instantly conscious of your own untidiness. I was still taking this in when the door of the neighbouring cabin swung open and a chap emerged who could only be described as quintessentially Norwegian in the most theatrical sense. Tall, white beard like a cloud that had lost its way, wearing a knitted jumper that probably predated my parents.

"You are the Englishman," he announced, which was not a question. "I am Bjorn. I have been watching for you since Tuesday." It was Thursday. I did not ask why. Some mysteries are better left intact.

Bjorn insisted on helping with my bags, which was fortunate as I had packed with the wild optimism of someone who believes they might need formal wear in a forest. He talked the entire time, a stream of consciousness that flowed from local cross-country skiing conditions to his opinions on British baking, which he had strong feelings about following a disappointing encounter with a scone in Inverness in 1987. He remembered the exact cafe. He remembered the waitress's name. I began to suspect Bjorn remembered everything that had ever happened to anyone in a fifty-kilometre radius.

The key, it transpired, was not in the expected place. Bjorn knew this because he had observed the previous guests, a German couple who had "the look of people who forget things in obvious places." He was correct. We found it under a flowerpot that contained no flowers, only a very resigned spider.

I had barely stepped inside when another figure appeared at the threshold. This was Ingrid, who introduced herself as the "unofficial mayor of the lower slope" and who had brought me a jar of something she described as "elderflower, but not the English kind, the proper kind." She looked me up and down with the frank assessment of a woman who had spent decades surviving Norwegian winters and had little patience for weakness. I straightened my spine involuntarily.

"The last Englishman here," she said, "tried to barbecue in January. We do not speak of him." I assured her I had no barbecue ambitions. She seemed only partially convinced.

The cabin smelled of pine and something else I couldn't identify, which Bjorn helpfully explained was "the smell of a place that is used properly, not like those new places in Lillehammer with their plastic everything." He said "Lillehammer" the way some people say "the tax office."

By evening I had met three more neighbours without leaving my own small deck. There was Erik, who maintained he could predict the weather by the behaviour of his neighbour's cat, and who had charts to prove it. There was Solveig, who ran the local shop and who interrogated me about my tea preferences with the seriousness of a security clearance interview. She approved of my answer, barely, and pressed a packet of something called "kvikk lunsj" into my hand with the instruction that I "eat it properly, not like chocolate, like a Norwegian." I still do not know what this meant. I ate it like a confused Englishman, which felt like a compromise.

Sitting there that first night, watching the light do that strange lingering thing it does at Norwegian latitudes, I found myself thinking about how I had arrived flustered and slightly desperate, and how quickly that feeling had been replaced by something else. These people had watched for me, judged my scone-adjacent nation, brought me preserves, and shared opinions I had not requested. There was something almost aggressively communal about it, a kind of neighbourliness that did not ask permission before arriving.

I am not a man who naturally attracts community. I am a man who attracts polite indifference in supermarket queues. Yet here I was, accepted apparently on the basis of shared geography and a willingness to listen to Bjorn's theories about British flour. It was humbling in a way I had not expected, to be so plainly seen and still welcomed.

The tea had gone cold. The light was finally fading. Somewhere, I suspected, Erik was checking the cat. And I was already wondering what tomorrow's unsolicited advice might bring, and finding that I was genuinely looking forward to it.