I have never been so relieved to see a Tesco bag in my life, and I was standing in a Norwegian petrol station at the time. Let me explain.

The drive from Sandefjord Airport to Porsgrunn had been textbook Scandinavian: pine forests, glassy fjord glimpses, and that particular quality of light that makes everything look slightly filtered for Instagram. My partner was navigating, I was driving our hire car with the confidence of someone who had last operated a manual gearbox in 2008, and somewhere around the E18 junction, our carefully compiled shopping list for self-catering had vanished into the footwell, never to be seen again.

This is how we ended up at a Circle K near the Porsgrunn turnoff, clutching a single plastic bag from home that had somehow migrated into my hand luggage, trying to reconstruct our meal plan from memory. "Did we need eggs?" "Definitely eggs." "How many?" "All of them, probably. It's Norway." We bought six. We would need twelve. This foreshadowing becomes important later.

The holiday home itself, when we finally arrived, was one of those red wooden places that looks like it should have a gnome in the garden. Proper Telemark style, all vertical cladding and white trim, with a kitchen that immediately made me feel both excited and slightly fraudulent. There was a proper coffee press, which I took as a challenge to my usual instant ways, and a hob that looked like it had opinions about how it should be used.

Our first evening was meant to be simple. Pasta, jar of sauce, early night. But we had forgotten the sauce. We had, however, purchased three different types of brown cheese at the petrol station because my partner got flustered by the dairy aisle and panicked-buyed. Brunost on spaghetti is not a recognised cuisine anywhere, and after one experimental forkful, we admitted defeat and drove the five minutes back to central Porsgrunn for a takeaway pizza. Sometimes self-catering means knowing when not to.

The morning market in Porsgrunn's town square became our salvation and our routine. We went three times in six days, which even the fishmonger started to notice. "You again," he said on Tuesday, though in Norwegian so I just smiled and pointed at cod until he wrapped it. The produce was embarrassingly good compared to what I was used to back home - tomatoes that actually tasted of something, new potatoes with soil still clinging to them, bundles of dill that filled the car with aniseed freshness. I kept buying herbs I couldn't identify and looking them up later, which is how I learned that what I thought was fancy parsley was actually something called "graslok" and absolutely not a soup garnish.

My cooking attempts improved marginally as the week progressed. The cod became a respectable fish stew with fennel and those mysterious tomatoes. I mastered the coffee press after only two volcanic overflows. But the brown cheese remained our white whale, sitting in the fridge and silently judging every meal it didn't belong to. On our final morning, I fried some with butter and ate it on crispbread with strawberry jam, which I read somewhere was traditional. It was... not unpleasant? I think the holiday had broken something in my palate. Or perhaps in my pride.

We left the remaining half-block for the next guests, along with a note of apology and a list of nearby restaurants that would actually feed you properly. Some holidays teach you to cook. Others teach you the precise location of every decent eatery within a five-mile radius. I consider both valuable life skills.