I have never been so grateful to see a gravel driveway in all my life. After a flight to Oslo, a train to Tonsberg, and what felt like a very scenic but increasingly desperate hunt for the right hire car, I finally rolled into Kjopmannskjaer on Notteroy island with the sort of relief usually reserved for finding a toilet after a long motorway journey. The mishap, you ask? I had spent forty-five minutes driving in circles around a nearby housing estate, utterly convinced my sat nav was playing a practical joke, only to discover I had been searching for "Kjopmannskjaer" while the local road signs cheerfully used a spelling with slightly different vowels. Norwegian has nine vowels, I now know. Nine. English has five and we can barely manage those.

The property sat quietly at the end of a narrow lane, painted that particular shade of deep red that seems to belong exclusively to Scandinavian coastal cottages. White trim, neat little windows, and a garden that sloped gently down toward glimpses of the Oslofjord through a screen of birch trees. I stood there with my suitcase wheels sinking into the gravel, breathing in air that smelled of pine and salt and something faintly smoky from a neighbour's chimney. The silence was immediate and slightly unnerving. I am from Birmingham. We do not do silence.

Letting myself in, I immediately committed the classic holidaymaker blunder of photographing everything before I had even removed my coat. The living room with its wood-burning stove, the kitchen with its unexpectedly enormous coffee machine, the bedroom with actual proper wool blankets folded at the foot of the bed. I have stayed in places where "cosy" means "small and slightly damp." This was cosy in the way a well-made jumper is cosy: intentional, comforting, slightly smug about its own quality.

I made the obligatory cup of tea using a kettle I initially could not locate because it was simply too attractive to register as a kettle. Scandinavian design gets you like that. Then I did what any sensible person would do after six hours of travel and one small identity crisis with Norwegian orthography: I sat on the small wooden deck with my mug and watched the light change over the water.

The fjord was doing that thing where it looks like mercury, all silvery and still, with the occasional fishing boat puttering past in the middle distance. A pair of oystercatchers worked the shoreline below, their orange bills flashing like little flags. I found myself thinking about how rarely I sit still at home, how my flat in Birmingham faces a car park, how I had not realised my shoulders could actually descend to their natural position rather than hovering somewhere near my ears.

Evening brought a peculiar orange quality to the light that made everything look slightly staged, as though Norway was showing off. I walked down to the small rocky beach below the property, pebbles crunching underfoot, and promptly slipped on a wet stone in the manner of someone who has forgotten that gravity works identically abroad. No harm done, except to my dignity and one slightly damp trouser leg, but it served as a useful reminder that first impressions work both ways. The place had revealed itself to me slowly, generously. I had revealed myself as someone who cannot be trusted on wet rocks.

I cooked a simple dinner from supplies picked up in Tonsberg, ate at the small kitchen table watching the last light fade, and felt something I can only describe as the very beginning of a proper rest.