I'd driven the hire car from Stavanger in what Norwegians probably call a light drizzle and I'd call a biblical deluge, convinced my Sat Nav had developed a grudge against me. The roads wound through Vindafjord like a toddler's scribble, and by the time I spotted the turning for Olensvag, I'd already missed it twice. The third attempt involved a spirited argument with a sheep who had parked himself in the middle of the lane with the entitled air of a creature who pays no road tax.

The holiday home sat above the fjord, and I use "sat" loosely. It clung. The sort of clinging a barnacle manages on a particularly smug rock. I'd booked a week in late October, that awkward shoulder season when summer has definitely left the building but winter hasn't quite committed to arriving. This indecision, I would learn, defined everything.

My first impression was colour. Not the colours, note. Just colour, singular. Everything had been rinsed in that particular grey-green that comes when the sky presses down low and the fjord reflects it back up, so you cannot tell where water ends and atmosphere begins. The trees had given up entirely. A few desperate birch still clung to yellow leaves like shoppers hoarding the last decent avocados, but mostly it was bare branches and that wet, saturated darkness of wood soaked through for months.

I fumbled with the key box, fingers already stiffening in a wind that carried the distinct personality of having travelled across open water with plenty of time to consider its attitude. The code worked on the fourth attempt. I'd written it on my phone, then my hand, then a receipt that had dissolved in my pocket. Organisation has never been my spiritual gift.

Inside, the cabin smelled of woodsmoke and the particular stillness of a place sealed up against the season. The owner had left the heating on low, bless them, and the contrast with the raw damp outside felt almost indecent. I stood in the hallway dripping onto the mat, suddenly aware that I'd packed for a version of Norway that exists in brochures. The one with crisp blue skies and perhaps a friendly reindeer. Not this.

The kitchen window framed the fjord like a painting that shifts when you aren't looking. I put the kettle on, because that is what one does, and watched a squall line approach from the north. It moved with purpose. The water changed texture, from beaten metal to something alive and restless. A fishing boat made its way toward the inner harbour, and I found myself holding my breath without quite knowing why. There is something about October here that strips away the performance of tourism. The boat wasn't picturesque. It was working. The season demanded it.

I unpacked badly, leaving cases half-open in corners. Every so often I'd wander to a different window, as if the view might have resolved into something cheerier. It never did. It simply became more itself. The light faded early, that particular northern fade that seems to happen vertically rather than horizontally, the sky darkening from the waterline upward.

By four o'clock I had every light on and was making a second pot of coffee with the frantic energy of someone trying to outpace the gloom. The season, I realised, was not something to observe here. It was something to participate in. The cabin wanted logs on the fire, thick socks, the deliberate slowness of adjustment. I had brought books and a stubborn intention to hike daily. The weather, visible through every window, found this amusing.

That first evening, I did light the fire. Badly. There is a particular shame to failing at fires in Norway, rather like being unable to boil water in Scotland. The logs were dry, the kindling adequate, my technique borrowed from films. It smoked. It smouldered with resentment. I opened the flue, closed the flue, opened windows, closed windows, and eventually produced something that was technically fire in the same way a three-legged dog is technically a dog.

I sat before it with a mug of something warm, listening to the weather move around the building. The season had arrived before me, would leave after me, and cared nothing for my preferences. There was a relief in this, though it took the fire's eventual surrender to warmth before I could admit it. October in Olensvag was not waiting to be enjoyed. It simply was, vast and indifferent and utterly, uncomfortably real.

I went to bed early, exhausted by adjustment, and woke once in the night to absolute blackness and the sound of rain finding new angles of approach. The season, I thought, before falling back asleep. The season has very strong opinions about doors.