I should have known the Norwegian weather would have the last laugh. There I was, smug as anything, having packed what I considered a thoroughly sensible autumn wardrobe for our stay at Fjellsaetra in Sykkylven. Fleece? Check. Waterproof jacket? Obviously. Decent walking boots? Present and correct. What I had not accounted for was October in More og Romsdal deciding to throw a proper strop on our very first afternoon.

The drive from Alesund had been nothing short of spectacular. We wound through valleys where the birch trees had turned the most extraordinary butter-yellow, like someone had gone mad with a paintbrush. The fjord glittered beside us, that particular grey-green it gets when the sky is doing its brooding Nordic thing. I kept making us pull over for photographs, much to my partner's visible irritation. "We'll be there in daylight if you stop faffing," he said. Reader, we were not there in daylight.

The mishap, when it came, was spectacularly stupid. We'd stopped at a petrol station just outside Sykkylven village for supplies, and I, in my wisdom, had decided to grab a coffee. The cup had one of those lids that looks secure but harbours secret ambitions. One sharp corner later, and I was wearing a latte down my front. Not just any front - my only decent jumper, the one I'd planned to look presentable in for our entire long weekend. I sat there in the passenger seat, smelling of milk and humiliation, as we climbed the final stretch to the cabin.

But here's the thing about arriving at Fjellsaetra in the thickening dusk of an October evening. The seasonal gloom, which ought to have felt oppressive, instead felt like being wrapped in something. The cabin materialised from the birch trees like something from a folk tale, its wooden walls dark with moisture, smoke curling from the chimney in a way that made me want to weep with gratitude. The surrounding hills had already lost their leaves at the higher elevations, leaving a skeleton forest that looked almost silver in the half-light.

My wet jumper ceased to matter entirely. We scrambled out of the car into air that tasted of woodsmoke and impending frost, and I felt that particular shift that happens when you leave ordinary life behind. The cabin's interior was all warmth and amber light, the kind of golden glow that only really works in autumn when the world outside has turned monochrome. Someone had left a small pile of dried heather on the windowsill, presumably from a summer gathering, now brittle and fragrant.

That first evening, we did nothing more ambitious than stand on the small terrace with mugs of something hot, watching the last light drain from the sky. The October darkness came on properly, not the gradual dimming of southern England but a decisive curtain-fall. Somewhere in the valley below, a dog barked, and the sound carried with that strange clarity that cold, still air provides.

I thought about my ruined jumper, hanging pathetically over a chair to dry. I thought about how I'd fretted over packing correctly, as if one could prepare for a Norwegian autumn with mere clothing. The season here was not something to dress against. It was something to meet on its own terms, to let settle over you like the mist that was already gathering in the lower meadows. I felt, standing there in my borrowed fleece, profoundly glad to be temporarily inadequate, temporarily unprepared, temporarily at the mercy of something larger than my own planning.

The frost came that night, etching patterns on the outside of the windows that we discovered come morning. I made coffee in the small kitchen, watching my breath barely visible in the air until the wood burner got going again. My jumper had dried stiff and smelling faintly of coffee still, which seemed fitting somehow. I wore it anyway, out onto the terrace again, where the birch trees stood in their yellow finery against a sky that had cleared to the palest, coldest blue.

October at Fjellsaetra was teaching me something I hadn't asked to learn. The season was not backdrop. It was the entire point.