I have never been so grateful to see a wooden staircase in all my life. After six hours of driving from Oslo, a ferry crossing where I spectacularly mistook the exit for the loo and nearly ended up in the engine room, and one wrong turn that took me through what I am fairly certain was someone's private farmyard, I finally pulled up at the little cabin near Tonsberg. The key safe code worked first time, which felt nothing short of miraculous given my current luck.

The mishap that defined my arrival, though, happened about ten minutes before I got there. Rounding a bend far too confidently, I hit a patch of gravel and watched my phone mount execute a perfect somersault into the footwell. There it stayed, bellowing directions to turn left in 200 metres while I crawled along at fifteen miles per hour, peering over the steering wheel like a pensioner on a Sunday outing. I found the turning eventually, of course, by which point my digital guide had given up entirely and fallen silent. I chose to interpret this as Norwegian stoicism rather than technological abandonment.

Stepping out of the car, the first thing that struck me was the smell. Not the sea exactly, though that was there, but something greener and older. Pine resin and warm stone and that particular dry sweetness of grass that has baked in sun all afternoon. The cabin sat tucked among trees with a view down towards the water that made my shoulders drop about three inches without my permission. I had not realised I was holding them up.

The place itself was simple in the best way. Wooden walls that creaked in a friendly fashion, a kitchen window framing nothing but green and blue, and a deck that demanded immediate occupation. I dumped my bags with theatrical exhaustion and did precisely that. The chair accepted me with a sigh of its own. A bee investigated my shoe, found it wanting, and buzzed off to better prospects. I decided this was excellent company.

I had brought three books, ambitiously, and a notebook in which I planned to write profound observations about the Norwegian psyche or possibly the quality of light. The notebook remained blank for the entire week. The books, however, got a proper battering. I read lying on the grass until the sun moved round and I had to shift, inchworm fashion, to follow it. I read on the deck with my feet up, coffee going cold beside me. I read in the evening with a blanket that smelled faintly of previous summers, watching the light linger and linger as if it too could not quite bring itself to leave.

The gentle exploration I had promised myself consisted mainly of wandering down to the water's edge each morning, sometimes with a swimming costume, more often without the energy to actually swim. I pottered to the local shop for bread and cheese, practising my three words of Norwegian on a patient woman who kindly pretended not to notice. I found a bench. I returned to it. This became my routine, my achievement, my grand adventure.

There is something deeply unfashionable about admitting that the highlight of your holiday was successfully doing nothing for several consecutive hours. We are meant to seek experiences, collect moments, maximise our time. Yet sitting in that particular patch of sunshine, watching a single cloud take approximately forty minutes to cross my field of vision, I felt something I had not in months. The absence of the need to be anywhere else, doing anything else, becoming anyone else.

On my final morning, I packed with the reluctance of a child leaving a party. The phone mount had recovered its dignity. I had not. I drove away slowly, windows down, catching last glimpses of water through the trees. The wrong turn that had plagued my arrival somehow failed to materialise for departure. Perhaps the place was letting me go gently, or perhaps I had simply stopped trying to rush. Either way, I carried home something better than photographs. I carried the memory of warmth on wooden boards, of a bee's indifference, of doing very little and finding it absolutely enough.