The SatNav had been insisting we were nearly there for the best part of forty minutes, which I now realise was its polite Norwegian way of saying "you've missed the turning, you absolute plum." My other half, who had been suspiciously quiet since we passed the same fjord viewpoint for the third time, finally broke the silence with a comment about my map-reading skills that I shall not repeat in polite company. We eventually found the turning to Viksefjorden by pure accident, spotting a hand-painted sign half-hidden behind a bush that looked like it had been there since the seventies. I reversed the hire car with what I hoped looked like confidence and not the blind panic I was actually feeling.

The property sat low against the hillside, red wooden cladding gleaming where the afternoon sun caught it. I had worried it might feel too isolated, too stark, but the first thing that struck me was how immediately it felt like somewhere you could properly stop. Not pause, not catch your breath, but actually stop. The kind of stop where you forget what day it is and genuinely do not care.

We dumped our bags with the enthusiasm of people who had been in a car since dawn and stumbled straight onto the terrace. The fjord stretched out below us, utterly ridiculous in its beauty, like someone had painted it to show off. I remember standing there with a cup of tea that I had not properly made because I could not be bothered to find the kettle, just hot water and a teabag dunked with decreasing patience, and thinking that this was exactly what I needed and precisely what I had been avoiding admitting I needed.

The first morning set the tone for everything that followed. I woke to light pouring through thin curtains and the sound of absolutely nothing much at all. No traffic, no neighbours, no urgent anything. Just birds and the occasional distant putter of a boat somewhere out on the water. I lay there longer than I have lain anywhere since I was a teenager, reading the same paragraph of my novel repeatedly because concentration seemed beside the point. My other half had already migrated outside with coffee and was doing that thing where you stare at a view for so long it becomes meditative, or possibly they had fallen asleep sitting up. With them, you can never quite tell.

We developed a routine so lazy it barely qualified as a routine. Breakfast on the terrace, always late, always involving too much bread and that excellent Norwegian butter that makes you question every life choice that led you to spread anything else. Then a slow wander down to the water's edge, perhaps a paddle if we were feeling energetic, which we rarely were. The shoreline near the property offered enough gentle interest for an hour's pottering, smooth stones to turn over, the odd jellyfish to poke with a stick and then feel guilty about. We found a spot of flat rock that became "our" spot, though I suspect every previous guest had claimed identical ownership.

Some days we walked a little further along the lane, just to see what was there, which was usually more fjord, more trees, more of that particular Norwegian light that makes ordinary things look considered and meaningful. We passed the same elderly man walking his dog on three separate occasions and progressed from nodding to actual greetings to a brief conversation about the weather that I understood perhaps sixty percent of, my Norwegian being limited to "takk" and "snakker du engelsk" delivered with apologetic grimaces.

The afternoons dissolved into reading, dozing, and occasional competitive napping. I finished one book, started another, abandoned a third because it required too much thinking. The sun, when it appeared, which was more often than my pessimistic British soul had expected, turned the terrace into something magnetic. We moved our chairs to follow it like slow, sun-drunk sundials. I developed a tan line from my reading glasses that I wore with perverse pride.

I had packed walking boots with serious intentions, the kind of boots that suggest ruggedness and purpose. They stayed in the car boot the entire week. I felt briefly guilty about this, that familiar nag that relaxation must be earned through prior exertion, then deliberately let it go. The boots would keep. The sun would not.

On our final evening, we sat out until nearly eleven, the sky still holding light in that unsettling northern way, drinking wine we had bought from the supermarket in Sveio and feeling pleasantly hollowed out by a week of very little. I thought about the SatNav mishap, the initial frustration, the way irritation had melted into something softer as soon as we arrived. Sometimes getting slightly lost is how you find exactly where you need to be, or at least that is what I told myself while topping up my glass and refusing to check the time.

We left the next morning with sand still in our shoes and a shared, unspoken agreement that we would try to remember this feeling, this permission to do almost nothing and find it enough. I suspect we will forget, because that is what happens. But for one week in Hordaland, between a red wooden house and a fjord that did not care about our schedules, we lived at the speed that humans probably ought to live more often, and it was absolutely glorious.