I have never been so relieved to see a wooden cabin in my life, and that includes the time I got caught in a hailstorm near Aviemore. The drive from Alesund Airport to Sykkylven had been spectacular in that aggressively Norwegian way, all jagged fjord walls and water so still it looked like someone had forgotten to turn the animation back on. But somewhere around Stranda, my phone decided this would be the perfect moment to die, taking with it my carefully downloaded directions and, more critically, my carefully downloaded cabin door code.

I am not someone who handles this sort of thing well. I am someone who prints boarding passes. I had not printed the door code.

Two hours of increasingly panicked driving followed, during which I developed an irrational hatred of tunnels. Norway loves a tunnel. Short tunnels, long tunnels, tunnels that curve so you cannot see the end and start wondering if you have accidentally driven into a portal. I emerged from one particularly sinuous example to find a petrol station where a very patient woman listened to my fractured explanation, made a phone call, and wrote down a number that turned out to be not quite right but close enough that I got in on the fourth attempt. I have never felt more like a competent adult.

The cabin sat among birch trees with the afternoon sun pouring through, and I stood on the deck for a solid ten minutes doing absolutely nothing except remembering how to breathe normally. The fjord glittered below, and somewhere a bird made a sound like a small piece of machinery winding down. Inside smelled of pine and faintly of the coffee someone had considerately left in the cupboard. I made a cup immediately, more ritual than necessity, and carried it back outside to a wooden chair that creaked in a reassuring, grandfatherly way.

That became the pattern without my really deciding on it. Mornings I would wander down to the small jetty, sometimes with a fishing rod I found in the utility room, more often with a book I had been meaning to finish since approximately 2019. The fish were not interested in my literary company, which suited everyone. I would read a chapter, look up at the water, read another paragraph, notice a cloud doing something interesting, and realise an hour had passed. The sunshine in late May has that quality of stretching time, of making a morning feel generous rather than urgent.

I did explore, but gently, in the way you might explore your own garden after a long absence. A path led along the shoreline to a small beach where the stones were flat and warm, perfect for the specific pleasure of skimming rocks badly. I walked to the local shop in Sykkylven village one afternoon, bought bread and brown cheese, and felt genuinely accomplished. The woman behind the counter asked if I was hiking the nearby trails, and I admitted I was mostly walking to the jetty and back. She nodded as if this were a perfectly respectable life choice, which in that moment it absolutely felt like.

The cabin had no television, which I had initially noted with mild concern and quickly came to cherish. Evenings meant cooking something simple, opening the wine I had sensibly purchased at the airport, and sitting on that same creaking chair as the light softened and the fjord turned from silver to grey to something approaching black. I wrote postcards I knew I would forget to post. I watched a moth investigate the window with more dedication than I have ever applied to anything.

On my final morning I packed with the reluctance of someone leaving a conversation mid-sentence. The door code, now scrawled on three separate pieces of paper, went into my wallet with my passport. I took one last walk to the jetty, stood there with my hands in my pockets, and watched a heron lift off from the far shore with the unhurried confidence of something with nowhere particular to be. I tried to memorise the feeling, knowing I would lose some of it to ordinary life, knowing too that some would stay, the way warmth lingers on stone after the sun has moved on.