I should have known the sat-nav was up to no good the moment it tried to send me through what looked like someone's back garden in Dalen. Three hours from Oslo, two ferry crossings, and one spectacularly wrong turn later, I found myself parked outside a shed asking a man in overalls if this was the Vradal Panorama. He just laughed, said something in Norwegian that definitely wasn't a compliment, and pointed me back up the hill. I arrived at the proper place twenty minutes later, still clutching a bag of petrol station hot dogs that had gone cold somewhere around the second fjord.

The cabin itself stopped me dead. Perched above Lake Nisser with windows that seemed to swallow half the sky, it was the sort of place that makes you feel slightly inadequate about your own life choices. I was still standing there with my mouth open when a woman emerged from next door carrying a rake like it was a weapon of war. This was Ingrid, my immediate neighbour for the week, and she had opinions about everything before I'd even introduced myself.

"You're the English," she announced, which felt less like a question and more like a diagnosis. "Last English here left the hot tub on all night. Cost them four thousand kroner." She said this with visible satisfaction, then softened slightly and told me where the proper bin bags were kept. "The blue ones. Not the white. The white are for summer people."

Ingrid turned out to be a permanent fixture, a retired teacher who had spent forty years explaining fractions to reluctant teenagers and now devoted her considerable pedagogical energies to monitoring the comings and goings of holiday lets. Within an hour she'd informed me that the couple in cabin seven were newlyweds from Stavanger ("too much noise, not enough fishing"), that the man across the way came every September to write a novel he never finished, and that I was holding the firewood wrong.

"Like this," she said, demonstrating a grip that suggested significant experience with both axes and insubordinate children. "Or you'll get splinters and complain to the office, and then I have to hear about it."

The hot tub, I should mention, became a running theme. On my second evening, still aching from an ambitious attempt at the local hiking trail that Ingrid had warned me was "not for people who eat petrol station food," I lowered myself into the steaming water and promptly heard a voice from the darkness. "Temperature's wrong." It was the novelist from across the way, peering over his deck railing with the haunted expression of a man who had spent too long alone with his characters. "Should be thirty-eight. That's thirty-nine. You'll cook." He withdrew without further explanation, leaving me to adjust the dial with the urgency of someone defusing a bomb.

The local shop, a ten-minute walk down a road that Ingrid insisted was "flat if you have proper boots," was run by a chap called Erik who had inherited the place from his father and his father's father before that. He sold everything from fishing licences to frozen pizza to something he described as "traditional wool underthings" that looked medically concerning. I went in for milk and emerged forty minutes later with a detailed history of Telemark's hydroelectric development, a recommendation for a swimming spot that "only locals use," and a bag of dried fish I hadn't intended to buy but felt unable to refuse.

"You're staying at Panorama," Erik said, which again felt like an accusation. "Ingrid's watching you." He said this with a straight face, then laughed for a solid thirty seconds at my expression.

By day three I had developed what I can only describe as a comfortable paranoia. Every trip to the hot tub, every attempt at the communal barbecue, every fumbled effort to separate my recycling according to Ingrid's exacting standards - all of it observed, catalogued, commented upon. The novelist emerged periodically to deliver cryptic warnings about weather fronts and water pressure. A teenage boy from one of the lower cabins began greeting me with a solemn nod that suggested I had somehow become a known quantity in his personal mythology.

The turning point came on Thursday afternoon, when I returned from a genuinely successful fishing attempt - one trout, modest but defensible - to find Ingrid waiting on my deck with two cups of something hot and alcoholic. "You didn't fall in," she said, by way of congratulations. "The English usually fall in." We sat there as the light did that particular Norwegian thing of lasting forever while somehow still feeling precious, and she told me about her first husband, who had also fallen in, and her second, who had built the extension on her cabin, and her students, some of whom still sent cards.

The novelist joined us briefly, without invitation, to announce that he had finished chapter four after three years. Ingrid told him chapter four was too early to celebrate. He nodded seriously and went back to his cabin. I understood then something I hadn't at the start - that this place wasn't really about the panorama, spectacular as it was. It was about the particular, watchful, generous strangeness of the people who chose to inhabit it, year after year, novel after unfinished novel, cup after cup of whatever Ingrid was drinking.

I left the hot tub at thirty-eight degrees on my final night. Ingrid checked.