The ferry from Stavanger was meant to take forty minutes, but I spent the first ten of those minutes frantically patting my pockets after realising I'd left my house keys in the rental car back on the mainland. By the time I'd finished my little panic dance on the deck, a Norwegian chap in a woolly jumper had already phoned the ferry office, who'd phoned the car hire place, who'd promised to pop the keys in a taxi to meet us later. "Welcome to Jorpeland," he said, handing me a coffee from his thermos. "We lose things so you don't have to."

That set the tone rather nicely.

The property sat up a gentle slope from Svines, a compact little waterside spot where the houses seem to huddle together for warmth against the fjord winds. Our host, a wiry fellow named Knut who must have been seventy if he was a day, was waiting on the gravel drive with a wheelbarrow. Not for our luggage, as it turned out, but because he'd been mending a fence and had forgotten to put it away. "Multitasking," he winked, though I'm fairly certain he hadn't actually done any tasking at all that morning beyond watching for our arrival.

The cottage itself was charming in that sturdy, no-nonsense Scandinavian way, but I barely got a look at it before Knut's neighbour appeared over the hedge. Astrid, he called her, though she corrected him twice before I caught that her name was actually Astrid and Knut simply enjoyed the mispronunciation. She'd brought a jar of something orange and unidentifiable, which she pressed into my hands with the solemnity of a state gift. "Cloudberry jam," she said. "Don't ask what cloudberries are. Nobody knows. They just appear."

I believed her.

Within an hour, I'd been introduced to a cast of characters that would have seemed excessive in a Richard Curtis film. There was young Magnus, who ran the tiny petrol station down the lane and spoke exclusively in fishing statistics. "Last Tuesday, cod. Fourteen kilos." This was apparently a complete conversational gambit in these parts. There was his grandmother, who sat outside the station in all weathers with a cat on her lap and opinions about British weather that she'd formed during a weekend in Blackpool in 1987. "Too wet," she told me, as if I'd personally arranged the precipitation.

The mishap with the keys became something of a village project. By evening, three separate people had stopped by to check whether the taxi had arrived, each bearing some small offering. One brought firewood. Another, a laminated map of local hiking routes with his own annotations in red pen. The third, a man called Erik who introduced himself as "not the important Erik, the other one," simply wanted to discuss whether I found Norwegian bread too dense. I admitted I hadn't tried it yet. He looked personally offended, then produced a loaf from his jacket pocket.

"Now you have," he said, and left without another word.

Knut reappeared at sunset, ostensibly to demonstrate the water heater, but really, I suspected, to continue his running commentary on village affairs. He pointed out each house in view and attached a scandal to it. Nothing malicious, mind you, just the accumulated texture of decades of proximity. "That one," he said, indicating a smart red cabin, "they painted it blue in 1994. Took three years to change it back." The implication was that I'd somehow understand this if I stayed long enough.

I found myself hoping I might.

The taxi finally arrived at half past nine, driven by a sleepy teenager who'd clearly been pulled from some important gaming session. The keys were handed over with the gravity of a hostage exchange. Knut insisted on walking me back to the cottage, though it was perhaps fifty metres, and at the door he paused to look out at the water.

"You'll like it here," he said. It wasn't a question, but it wasn't quite a statement either. More of a gentle instruction.

I thought about Astrid's cloudberries and Erik's bread and the grandmother's cat, which apparently had its own chair in the petrol station. I thought about how I'd arrived frazzled and keyless and been absorbed into something without anyone making a fuss about it.

"Yes," I said. "I think I will."

The water heater worked perfectly, by the way. Knut had shown me the wrong switch.