I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I tried to unlock a fjord-view cabin in Fiksdal with the key code for a villa in Spain. There I stood, jabbing 4729 into a keypad that blinked red at me like a disapproving grandmother, while my hire car sat purring with the boot still full of shopping from the Kiwi in Vestnes. Twenty minutes of increasingly frantic button-pressing and one mildly panicked phone call later, I realised my error. The actual code was taped inside my passport holder, where sensible people keep such things. I am not, it turns out, a sensible person.

The drive from Alesund Airport had already set the tone. I'd taken the ferry from Sjoholt, which felt impossibly grown-up for someone who still forgets which side of the road to drive on, and wound through valleys where the mountains crowd in like nosy neighbours at a bus stop. The cabin sat on a slope above Fiksdal, wooden and red and satisfyingly Scandinavian, with a deck that promised proper fjord-gawping opportunities.

But the real discovery came the next morning, when I ventured to the local petrol station for milk and found myself in conversation with Kjell, a man whose official job appeared to be "standing near the coffee machine dispensing opinions." He took one look at my attempted Norwegian greeting, switched seamlessly to English with a thick Molde accent, and informed me that I'd bought the wrong milk entirely. "That one's for baking," he said, with the gravity of someone revealing a state secret. "You want the blue one. The blue one is for drinking and for not being a tourist." I bought the blue one. I have no idea if there was any actual difference.

Kjell then introduced me to his wife, Inger, who was restocking the crisp shelf with the methodical patience of someone who had definitely heard all of Kjell's opinions several thousand times. She asked where I was staying, nodded approvingly at "Fiksdal," and immediately produced a hand-drawn map from her apron pocket. "You must walk to the viewpoint," she said, adding three X-marks with a biro. "Kjell proposed to me there. He was very nervous. He dropped the ring in the heather and we found it three days later." Kjell, to his credit, laughed like this was fresh comedy rather than a forty-year-old trauma.

That afternoon I took their recommended walk, which was steep enough to remind me that my fitness regime consists mainly of walking to the fridge, and found the viewpoint exactly where Inger's map promised. The fjord below looked like something from a promotional video, all mirror-water and dramatic cliffs, and I sat on a rock feeling pleasantly insignificant in that way that landscapes this size enforce upon you.

On the way back I met Gunnar, who was walking a dog the size of a small horse and who turned out to live in the neighbouring cabin to mine. He was seventy-ish, wearing wellies that had seen genuine agricultural service, and immediately offered me a beer from the six-pack he was carrying in a plastic bag. "You're the Englishman who couldn't open his door," he said, which told me everything I needed to know about local information networks. We sat on his deck, which was substantially more weathered than mine, and he explained that he'd retired to Fiksdal from Oslo fifteen years ago because "the people here still talk to each other, which in Oslo they have forgotten how to do."

His dog, whose name was simply "Hund" with a particular emphasis that suggested this was formal Norwegian naming convention, spent the entire conversation trying to steal my beer. Gunnar found this hilarious. "He has expensive taste," he said. "Like my first wife."

By the time I stumbled back to my own cabin, slightly beer-happy and thoroughly talked-out, the light was doing that prolonged golden thing that northern evenings specialise in. I sat on my deck with the correct milk in a mug of tea, watching a fishing boat putter across the fjord below, and thought about how I'd arrived expecting scenery and found something better: people who treat strangers with the casual intimacy of old friends, who carry maps in aprons and proposals in pockets, who stand by petrol station coffee machines and gently correct your dairy errors.

I still don't know if there was any real difference between the milks. I suspect Kjell was having me on. I suspect, too, that this is precisely the point.