I have never been so grateful for heated seats as I was driving the final stretch to Kvisvik in late October. The hire car's thermometer read three degrees, my phone had lost signal somewhere near Molde, and I had just committed the classic holiday blunder of filling the diesel tank with petrol at a petrol station whose Norwegian signage I had confidently, and entirely wrongly, interpreted. Cue forty minutes of sheepish gesturing at a remarkably patient attendant while autumn rain lashed the forecourt. Not my finest hour. But then the fjord came into view, and suddenly the smell of wrong fuel on my jacket mattered rather less.

The approach to the property is what stays with me now. The road narrows to a single track, hemmed in by birch trees that had turned the colour of old pennies, their leaves spiralling down in that particular way they do when the season is turning properly. Each gust off the water sent another flurry across the windscreen. I kept stopping to let them settle, not from courtesy to other drivers - there were none - but because I could not quite believe the theatre of it. The light was failing early, as it does that far north in autumn, a soft grey-blue that made everything feel slightly unreal, like driving through a photograph someone had forgotten to finish developing.

Kvisvik itself sits low against the hillside, a modest timber place with that red-ochre stain you see everywhere in rural Norway, as if the buildings have rusted charmingly into the landscape. The key was where the owner said it would be, under a ceramic frog that had seen better decades. I fumbled it in the gloom, fingers already stiff from the damp, and managed to drop it into a puddle. Of course I did. The door stuck slightly, swollen from the season's moisture, then gave with a sigh of Scandinavian resignation.

Inside, the warmth hit like a welcome wall. Whoever had prepared the place understood October in More og Romsdal. The underfloor heating was on, subtle and perfect, and someone had left the lamps glowing against the early dark. I stood in the hallway dripping on the mat, still wearing my petrol-station jacket, and felt something unknot in my chest that I had not known was knotted. The windows were already black mirrors, reflecting the room back at me, but I could hear the water moving somewhere below, that particular low note of a fjord in still weather.

I had planned to unpack properly, to be organised, to make a sensible meal. Instead I found the terrace doors, wrestled them open against their autumn-swollen frame, and stood outside in my socks on boards that were faintly slick with the season's first frost. The cold was immediate and absolute, a proper Nordic cold that clarifies rather than merely chills. Across the water, the hills on the far side of the fjord were just visible, black shapes against a sky that still held a thin luminescence in the west, the last of a sun that had set hours ago without my noticing.

A heron went over, low and deliberate, heading somewhere it presumably found more sensible than standing on a frozen terrace in wet socks. I watched until I could not distinguish it from the darkness, then went inside to find the whisky I had packed for exactly this moment. The seasons had brought me here, had shaped the mishaps and the beauty in equal measure, and I was suddenly, completely, exactly where I wanted to be.