I have never been so grateful for heated seats in my life as I was driving the hire car up to Fitjar last November. The plan was simple enough: fly into Bergen, collect the Volvo, stop for a coffee in Os, then cruise up the E39 to our little cabin on the water. What actually happened was that I missed the turning for the ferry, ended up in a village whose name I still cannot pronounce, and spent twenty minutes doing a three-point turn on a single-track road while a local in a pickup truck watched with the patient amusement of a man who had seen this many times before.

By the time we reached the Fitjar cabin, the afternoon light was already fading. November in Hordaland does not mess about with daylight. You get a handful of grey hours and then the darkness settles in like a guest who has come to stay. I stepped out of the car and the wind hit me immediately, carrying that particular salt-and-cold smell of the North Sea. The fjord stretched out before us, gunmetal and restless, and I remember thinking that summer visitors probably saw something entirely different here. They got the midnight sun, the barbecues on the deck, the kayaks pulled up on the shingle. We got this: raw, honest, and absolutely magnificent in its own stern way.

The cabin itself was a welcome sight. Proper Scandinavian design, all clean lines and enormous windows that I suspected would be wasted on us given the hours of actual daylight. My partner fumbled with the key box while I stood there in inadequate footwear, already feeling the damp creep through my supposedly waterproof boots. The first thing I noticed inside was the wood burner, already stocked with birch logs by the owners. The second thing was the view, even in that failing light, of the water and the islands beyond. You could not escape the season here. The low sun, when it bothered to appear, barely cleared the hills across the fjord. The trees were bare, skeletal against the sky. Everything spoke of winter gathering its forces.

I made a fool of myself with the heating system, naturally. Spent ten minutes prodding at a digital panel before realising the main switch was hidden behind a cupboard door. My partner found this hilarious and filmed me for posterity. By the time I got it working, the wood burner had taken the edge off anyway, and we sat there in our coats like two people who had slightly misjudged their packing, watching the last of the grey light leak out of the sky.

What struck me most, that first evening, was how the season forced a particular rhythm on you. There was no wandering down to the water for a late swim, no sitting out with a book until ten. The darkness came and you retreated inward. We cooked a simple dinner from supplies we had brought from Bergen, because the local shops had limited hours even on good days. The rain started around eight, proper horizontal stuff that rattled against those enormous windows, and we just looked at each other and laughed. This was not the Norway of brochures. This was something else entirely, something that demanded you meet it on its own terms.

I fell asleep that night to the sound of wind in the rigging of boats pulled up for the winter, and the occasional distant rumble of a ferry somewhere out in the black water. Already I could feel the season working on me, slowing me down, making me pay attention to small things. The warmth of the burner. The particular quality of the light when it finally came. The way the whole landscape seemed to hold its breath, waiting for snow.