I should have known the holiday proper had begun when I managed to leave my driving licence at the airport coffee shop in Trondheim. There I was, two hours into a rental car journey south, patting down every pocket like a man performing an odd roadside dance, before the awful realisation dawned. The barista had probably binned it by now. Still, the chap at the rental desk had seen worse, he assured me, waving me on with a sort of weary benevolence that suggested Norwegian car hire staff have witnessed every flavour of British incompetence.

The drive to Svorkmo unfolded like one of those slow television programmes the Nordics do so well. Pine forests gave way to glimpses of the Orkla River, then more pine forests, then a sudden, almost apologetic scattering of red wooden houses. I found my turn by spotting a man in overalls leaning against a fence who pointed wordlessly up a gravel track, as if people like me arrived lost several times daily.

The property sat where the trees cleared, a proper Norwegian cabin with that distinctive dried grass on the roof that always makes me think of hobbits with excellent taste. I was still photographing it from seventeen angles when my neighbour emerged. Eldbjorg, as I later learned, must be seventy-five and possesses the sort of directness that comes from decades of rural living without time for nonsense.

"You are the English," she stated, rather than asked. "You will need help with the firewood."

Before I could mount any defence of my national competence, she had marched inside, inspected the stove with the eye of a surgeon, and pronounced the previous guests "idiots who burned wet wood." Her husband Knut appeared from behind the shed, introduced himself by surname only, and spent twenty minutes explaining the correct angle for splitting logs while I nodded with the fraudulent seriousness of a man who had never split anything in his life.

The local shop, I discovered, is less retail experience and more community confessional. I popped in for milk and emerged forty minutes later with a full accounting of whose boat needed engine work, which hunter had bagged an elk "of questionable legality," and why I absolutely must try the brown cheese from the farm two valleys over. The woman behind the counter, Inger, refused my card for purchases under fifty kroner with the firmness of someone upholding sacred tradition rather than mere shop policy. We compromised on milk, brown cheese, a fishing lure I did not need, and some pickled herring that she described as "acceptable."

That evening, attempting to light the stove with Eldbjorg's approved wood, I produced more smoke than warmth. A knock at the door revealed not my self-appointed mentor but a teenage boy from the neighbouring cabin who introduced himself as Markus and said simply, "Grandmother sent me." He had the fire roaring in four minutes flat, accepted a chocolate biscuit with dignified restraint, and explained that he was "practising English for school" by watching unsubtitled episodes of something called Love Island. I chose not to enquire further.

By bedtime, the cabin had warmed to something approaching cosy, the river provided its steady background hum, and I sat with a cup of tea reflecting on my first day. I had arrived a flustered foreigner with lost documents and no firewood skills. I was now, apparently, a project. There is something peculiarly Norwegian about this form of hospitality, the way help arrives without invitation yet without intrusion, the way conversations assume you will return tomorrow and the day after.

I fell asleep wondering if Eldbjorg would approve of my morning fire-lighting, and suspecting rather strongly that she would already know the answer before I woke.