The drive up to Ringebu had been going suspiciously well, which in my experience is always a warning sign. We'd left Oslo on time, the hire car's heated seats were doing God's work, and even the playlist was behaving itself. Then, somewhere past Lillehammer, I had what I can only describe as a navigational brain fade. Convinced I knew better than both the sat nav and my partner, I took a turn that felt "more scenic." It was certainly scenic. It was also a dead end at a farm where a very large dog expressed its opinions about our arrival at considerable volume. Twenty minutes of reversing down a gravel track later, we were back where we started, slightly humbled and significantly dustier.

By the time we actually found the place, I was ready to collapse into the nearest horizontal surface and remain there for the foreseeable future. Which, as it turned out, was precisely the right approach.

The cabin sat among low birch trees with the Gudbrandsdalen valley spreading out beyond it, all soft greens and distant blue-grey mountains. Nothing dramatic, nothing trying too hard. Just that particular Norwegian light that makes everything look slightly more honest than it does elsewhere. My partner gave me the look. The one that said "you got us lost but I'll allow it because this is rather nice." I accepted the terms.

We'd brought books. Multiple books, in that optimistic way you do when you imagine yourself as a person who reads serious things in nature. I got through three pages of something worthy before defaulting to a paperback thriller I'd already read twice. There is a specific pleasure to re-reading trash in good light that no literary critic has ever adequately captured. I did this on the wooden deck, wrapped in a blanket that smelled faintly of previous holidays, while the sun moved slowly across a sky that seemed in no particular hurry either.

The cabin had a small kitchen that we used for breakfasts of brown cheese on crispbread, that particular Norwegian combination that sounds wrong and tastes absolutely right. Lunches were whatever we'd cobbled together from the Meny in Ringebu village. Dinners became an elaborate negotiation about who was too comfortable to move. Usually me. Usually I lost, or won, depending on how you frame laziness.

We walked, but not far. A path through the birch woods behind the property, maybe twenty minutes of gentle uphill before the view opened properly. Then back down, because the point was never to achieve anything. The point was to notice how the light came through the leaves in patterns that shifted if you watched long enough. I am not normally a person who watches leaves. This was new. I didn't mind it.

One morning I attempted to sit outside with coffee and simply be present, as the magazines suggest. I lasted eleven minutes before needing to check whether the coffee was still warm, whether my book was within reach, whether a cloud meant rain. My mind does not do stillness gracefully. But I kept trying, in short bursts, and somewhere in the repetition it became slightly less performative. Slightly.

The village of Ringebu itself got a few visits. The stave church, because you must, and because it sits there being quietly extraordinary while you stand around feeling inadequately historical. A wander past the train station, where the Oslo-Trondheim line stops and where I briefly considered how many other places I could reach if I wasn't so committed to doing absolutely nothing. Then back to the cabin, to the deck, to the book I'd already read.

On our final afternoon, the sun came through in that low, golden way that makes Scandinavia briefly convince you that winter isn't coming. I lay on the grass, not reading, not achieving, not even particularly thinking. A bee investigated my shoe. I let it. This, I realised, was what I'd come for. Not the landscape, though it helped. Not the cabin, though it was perfect. Just permission to be unremarkable for a while, in a place that asked nothing of me.

We left the next morning, slightly stiff from outdoor furniture, slightly sad, slightly more ourselves than when we'd arrived. I drove the correct route back to Oslo. Some lessons, even I learn eventually.