The ferry from Horten was meant to be the easy bit. I had checked the timetable three times, packed my little hire car with more thermal layers than a Norwegian onion, and even practised saying "Tjome" without making it sound like a sneeze. What I had not practised was driving onto a ferry ramp that was, in fact, not a ferry ramp at all, but a rather steep fishing jetty belonging to a chap called Leif who was mending nets nearby. He looked up. I looked up. My front wheels looked down. The whole thing had a certain silent film quality to it.

Leif wandered over at a pace that suggested he had seen this before, possibly several times that very morning. He did not laugh, which was somehow worse. He simply said, "Ferry is that way," pointed vaguely toward some trees, and helped me reverse with the patient resignation of a man who had long ago accepted human fallibility. I thanked him in my phrasebook Norwegian. He replied in perfect English that he had worked in Hull for fifteen years. Of course he had.

The actual ferry took six minutes. I spent five of them watching Leif become a small, judgmental dot on the shore.

The cottage sat among pine trees with red paint so perfectly Scandinavian it almost looked sarcastic. My host, a woman called Ingrid who appeared to be in her sixties but moved like she was late for something important, met me on the gravel drive. She was carrying a basket of chanterelles and wearing wellies that had seen actual use. "You are the jetty man," she said. Not a question. News travels fast on Tjome, apparently at the speed of a Leif.

Ingrid showed me round with the efficiency of someone who had done this hundreds of times but still found small pleasures in it. The wood-burning stove, she explained, was "not for decoration, this is Norway." The coffee was in the tin marked "kaffe," which she pronounced with a satisfaction I envied. When I asked about nearby shops, she waved her hand at the window and said, "The sea has everything." I am still not entirely sure what this meant, but I have thought about it at 3am more than once.

That evening I walked down to the water, partly to clear my head of ferry-related shame, partly because Ingrid had mentioned that her brother Gunnar sometimes fished there and "liked to talk." This proved to be the understatement of the century. Gunnar was seventy-four, built like a nautical barrel, and had opinions on cod that I can only describe as deeply personal. He showed me his fishing knife, which had belonged to his father, and his father's father, and possibly Odin. He told me about the time he caught a mackerel that he swore looked at him with recognition. "Fish know," he said, nodding seriously. "They know everything."

I did not argue. You do not argue with a man who has a knife inherited from mythology.

On the way back, I stopped at a small honesty-box vegetable stall near the cottage. A handwritten note said "Potatoes 30kr. Trust you." Something about that trust, placed so casually in a world that does not always deserve it, made me stand there longer than necessary. I put in forty kroner and took nothing extra, suddenly anxious about being the jetty man who also stole potatoes.

That night I lit the stove wrong three times and filled the cottage with smoke that smelled of pine and personal inadequacy. Ingrid, passing with her dog, shouted through the window that I needed to "make friends with the flue." I shouted back that we were currently in a fight. She laughed, a proper loud thing, and carried on into the dark.

I sat there with my smoky jumper and my overpriced potatoes and thought about how I had come to this island expecting scenery, which I got, but found instead these small collisions with people who seemed entirely themselves in a way I was still learning to be. Leif and his nets. Ingrid and her mushrooms. Gunnar and his fish conspiracy theories. They were not performing anything. They were simply there, rooted as the pines, letting strangers stumble onto their jetties and into their stories.

The stove eventually caught properly. I made terrible coffee from the tin and drank it by the window, watching the last ferry cross the black water, its lights steady and sure of where it was going.