I have never been so grateful to see a wood-burning stove in my life, and I say that as someone who once spent three hours trying to light a disposable barbecue in a drizzle.

The drive up to our roros in Alen had been textbook Norwegian countryside: rolling hills, the odd red barn clinging to the hillside like a barnacle, and enough switchbacks to make my eldest declare from the back seat that she was "definitely, absolutely, one hundred percent going to be sick." She was not sick. She did, however, manage to drop an entire bag of salt and vinegar crisps down the gap between the seat and the centre console, where I suspect they remain to this day.

We arrived at the property in late afternoon, that golden hour when everything looks either impossibly charming or slightly haunted depending on your mood. I was firmly in the latter camp, having just spent twenty minutes at a petrol station in Oppdal trying to explain with gestures and terrible pronunciation that I needed de-icer, not a hot dog. The key safe code worked first time, which felt like a minor miracle, and then the door swung open and there it was: the smell of pine, the hush of a place that has been waiting quietly for someone to arrive, and a draft from somewhere near the kitchen that suggested the house was breathing.

My wife immediately began what I have come to call the "holiday inventory," a ritual inspection of cupboards, drawers, and the critical question of whether there is a cafetiere. There was. There was also a collection of mugs that looked like they had been acquired one by one from various charity shops over several decades, each with its own personality. I chose one that said "World's Best Golfer" despite never having held a golf club. The children had already vanished upstairs to argue about who would sleep in which bunk, a negotiation that sounded like it might require UN intervention.

I made the mistake of offering to fetch firewood from the store outside. This is where the mishap occurred, though I should say it was not dramatic enough for a hospital visit, merely humiliating enough for a good story. The wood was stacked neatly under a lean-to, and I grabbed an armful with the confidence of a man who has seen films where people do this. What I had not accounted for was the sheet of black ice that had formed on the flagstones between the wood store and the back door. My feet went one way, my dignity went another, and an entire winter's supply of birch logs scattered across the garden with a sound like a very slow, very wooden drum roll. I lay there for a moment, staring up at a sky that was already doing that remarkable Norwegian thing of turning pink and orange at the edges, and thought: well, this is it. This is the holiday. Not the pristine photographs on the website, not the imagined version where we are all effortlessly outdoorsy, but this. Me, flat on my back, slightly winded, with a twig in my hair.

The children appeared at the window, pressed their faces against the glass, and did not move to help. They were laughing too hard.

By the time I had gathered the firewood and made three more slightly less catastrophic trips, the stove was crackling and my wife had produced a pot of something that smelled of tomatoes and whatever herbs she had found in the cupboard. The children were playing a card game at the table with rules they were making up as they went along. I sat in the chair closest to the stove, feeling the warmth creep back into my hands, and watched the light fade completely over the hills outside.

That first evening, we did nothing remarkable. We ate, we talked nonsense, the children squabbled over whose turn it was to add a log to the fire. Someone found a pack of biscuits that had been hiding in a tin. We went to bed early, exhausted by the journey and the fresh air, and I fell asleep to the sound of wind in the trees and the occasional pop from the stove.

It was, I think, exactly what we had come for.