I have never been brilliant at reading maps, which is how I ended up driving our hire car down what I can only describe as a glorified sheep track somewhere west of Rauland. My partner, who had been dozing, woke up to find us bouncing past a rather startled-looking wooden cabin with a gnome the size of a toddler guarding its porch. "Scenic route?" she asked, in that tone that manages to be both supportive and deeply unimpressed. Forty minutes, one three-point turn on a gradient that felt practically vertical, and a muttered apology to a very judgmental-looking ewe later, we finally spotted the actual turning for our holiday home.

The place sat among low birch trees with the late afternoon sun pouring across its wooden deck, and I will admit that any lingering embarrassment about my navigational skills melted away rather quickly. It was one of those traditional Norwegian cabins, all red-painted cladding and white trim, with a proper wood-burning stove visible through the front window and a small cluster of deck chairs arranged like they were waiting specifically for us. The air smelled of pine and something else I could not quite place until my partner identified it as "absolutely nothing," by which she meant the complete absence of traffic fumes, fried food, or the general atmospheric soup of city living.

We dumped our bags with the chaotic energy of people who had been in a car for far too long and immediately claimed our respective deck chairs. I had brought three books, which even I recognised as optimistic given we were only staying a week, but there is something about sunshine in Norway that makes reading feel like an Olympic event you actually want to train for. The light here has a particular quality, thin and clear and seemingly endless in late May, stretching the evenings out like warm toffee. I read perhaps four pages before dozing off, which set the pattern for the days that followed.

The cabin had no particular agenda attached to it, which was precisely the point. We would wake without alarms, make coffee that tasted better than it had any right to, and then simply exist on that deck for hours. Occasionally one of us would wander down to the small lake visible through the trees, more for the pleasure of the walk than any real purpose. The water was still properly cold, but I managed a brief swim on our third day, emerging with the dignified shivering of someone who has made a choice and must live with it. My partner photographed my expression for posterity and refused to delete it.

There was a walking path that looped through nearby woodland, nothing strenuous, perhaps twenty minutes at the pace of people who have nowhere to be. We took it most mornings, usually spotting the same red squirrel who seemed to be conducting his own daily patrol. I named him Rauland, because it amused me and because the cabin had no television to provide alternative entertainment. He never acknowledged the name, which I chose to interpret as Norwegian reserve rather than personal rejection.

What struck me, somewhere around day four, was how thoroughly I had stopped checking my phone. Not through any virtuous digital detox intention, but simply because there was nothing I needed to know that the weather and my current page number could not tell me. The world continued its spinning elsewhere. Emails accumulated. Someone, somewhere, was probably having an opinion about something online. Here, the most pressing question was whether to move my chair six inches left to better follow the afternoon sun.

We did venture to the local shop twice, a practical little place where I attempted some extremely basic Norwegian and was rewarded with patient smiles and correct change. Bought some local cheese, some bread, nothing ambitious. Ate simple meals on the deck watching the light shift across the hillside opposite, the shadows of birch trees growing long and then longer still.

By the final morning, I had finished one and a half books, acquired a minor sunburn on my knees through over-optimistic shorts wearing, and achieved what I can only describe as a state of advanced uselessness. My partner found me staring at a bumblebee working its way through some clover near the deck, apparently having been doing so for ten minutes. "Back to reality tomorrow," she said, not unkindly. I nodded, though part of me suspected I would be leaving something important behind in that sunshine, something about the value of occasionally being exactly where you are and doing absolutely nothing with it.

The drive back to the airport took us past that same gnome-guarded cabin. I did not get lost this time, though I was briefly tempted.