I'd set off from Alesund that morning full of Nordic optimism, which is essentially just regular optimism but with better knitwear. The drive along the Romsdalsfjord was doing its usual trick of making me feel I'd accidentally wandered into a screensaver, all mirror-still water and mountains that looked like they'd been sketched by someone showing off. I was bound for a little holiday let in Isfjorden, a place I'd chosen chiefly because the name sounded appropriately dramatic for someone who'd spent the previous week in an open-plan office in Milton Keynes.

The mishap came approximately three minutes after arrival. I'd stopped at the local Spar to pick up essentials, by which I mean bread, cheese, and a chocolate bar I immediately ate in the car park. In my haste to appear like a capable independent traveller, I managed to lock my keys, my phone, and my dignity inside the hire car. There I stood, a grown man in sensible walking boots, patting his pockets with increasing desperation while a small queue of locals formed at the bus stop opposite, watching with the polite fascination Norwegians reserve for foreigners making a meal of things.

It was an older chap called Einar who broke the deadlock. He'd been leaning against the wall of the Coop, smoking with the unhurried air of someone who'd seen every possible variation of human foolishness and found most of them amusing. He ambled over, peered through the window at my keys sitting brazenly on the passenger seat, and said, "American?" with the resigned tone of a man expecting complicated explanations.

"British," I admitted, as if this clarified everything.

"Same thing for locking cars," he said, and laughed so hard he had to steady himself against my roof rack.

Einar, it transpired, knew the local breakdown chap, a man called Geir who ran a garage that also served as the village's informal parliament and gossip exchange. Within twenty minutes I was sitting in Einar's kitchen, drinking coffee that could have stripped paint, while he rang Geir and provided a running commentary on my incompetence in Norwegian that required no translation. His wife, Astrid, fed me waffles with brown cheese and told me about their granddaughter in Trondheim who'd once locked herself out of three consecutive flats in one year. "Family skill," Einar nodded, gravely.

Geir arrived with the cheerful demeanour of a man whose morning had just become interesting. He was enormous, built like a fjord-side boulder, and spent a full ten minutes examining my lock with the seriousness of a surgeon before producing a wire coat hanger with a flourish. "Specialist equipment," he said, straight-faced. The bus queue had grown, and I caught several encouraging thumbs-ups as the door finally clicked open.

Rather than leave it there, Geir insisted on following me to the holiday let to "check everything was satisfactory," by which he meant inspecting the property with the proprietary interest of a man who'd probably helped build half the village. The let turned out to be a charming wooden place perched above the fjord, all red paint and white trim and a view that made my earlier humiliation feel like reasonable admission price.

We stood on the deck while Geir pointed out various landmarks with the sweeping authority of a tour guide who'd never needed a qualification. That mountain there, he said, was where his brother had once attempted to paraglide and spent four hours in a tree. That boat bobbing in the distance belonged to a man who'd fished the same waters for forty years and still couldn't swim. "Optimist," Geir concluded, with evident respect.

By evening I'd met half the village without really trying. The woman in the Spar, whose name I never caught but whose eyebrows conveyed magnificent scepticism, advised me on fish buying with the intensity of someone passing down sacred knowledge. A teenage boy called Markus, delivering firewood on a quad bike, explained the local bus timetable with such elaborate conspiracy theories about its actual reliability that I suspected he'd never once ridden it himself.

I cooked badly that first night, having overestimated my ability with local ingredients and underestimated the aggressive nature of Norwegian mustard. I ate on the deck regardless, watching the light fade across the fjord in that slow, theatrical way it does at northern latitudes, feeling the particular contentment of someone who'd made a fool of himself and found the world no worse for it.

Einar had said something as I finally drove away from his house, keys now clutched like precious jewels. "You come back, we find you something else to lock yourself out of." The offer seemed genuine. I thought about that as I sat there, about how places become particular through their people, how a mishap I'd dreaded had become the thread connecting me to this small, stubborn, wonderfully unimpressed community. I'd arrived chasing scenery and found something better: the comfortable, comic, utterly unvarnished company of folk who'd seen my sort before and were kind enough not to mention it too often.