I have never been so grateful to see a red wooden house in all my life. After six hours of driving from Stockholm, two wrong turns caused by me confidently misreading a sign I insisted was "obviously pointing left," and one spectacular argument with a sat nav that I definitely lost, we finally crunched up the gravel drive to our Bergslagen in Orebro. It was late October, and the darkness had swallowed the countryside whole by half past four.

The mishap, though. I need to tell you about the mishap. Somewhere near Eskilstuna, convinced I was being economical and clever, I filled the hire car with petrol. Except I had not. I had filled it with diesel. The penny dropped at the exact moment the engine began making a noise like a very unwell tractor. Cue an hour by the side of the road, a very patient Swedish mechanic who spoke better English than I do, and my partner giving me a look that said we would be discussing this for approximately the rest of our relationship. By the time we reached the house, my holiday spirit was hanging by a thread.

Then I opened the car door. The cold hit me first, proper cold, the kind that makes your nose hairs stiffen and your breath puff out in cartoon clouds. But with it came the smell of woodsmoke and wet pine needles, and somewhere in the blackness beyond the porch light, I could hear water moving. The owner had left the key under a ceramic frog by the woodshed, which struck me as charmingly trusting, and when we stepped inside, the warmth was almost shocking. The house had been preheated, bless them, and the radiators ticked contentedly in every room.

I will be honest, my first impression of the Bergslagen was not visual at all. It was thermal. I stood in the hallway with my eyes closed, still wearing my coat, just letting the heat seep back into my bones. The season had turned the place into a refuge before I had even seen the kitchen or the bedrooms or the view from the upstairs window. When I finally looked around, the house revealed itself in layers. Dark wooden beams, a wood-burning stove squatting in the corner like a promise, windows that showed nothing but my own reflection and the odd snowflake that had started falling while we were not paying attention.

October in Orebro is not trying to impress anyone. The trees were mostly bare, the garden was a soggy mess of fallen leaves, and the lake we could hear but not yet see would be bitter enough to stop your heart. Yet this blunt honesty was exactly what I needed after my diesel debacle. There was no performance to it, no summer holiday pressure to be constantly doing things. The season demanded a slower pace, and the house obliged. We found blankets in a chest. We found a stash of candles. We found a note saying the nearest shop was a fifteen-minute drive and would close at six, which sent us straight back out into the dark with a shopping list scrawled on the back of a ferry receipt.

That first evening, we cooked badly, burned the bottom of a pan, and ate by candlelight because we could not find the main light switch. The snow turned to sleet against the windows. I kept waiting to feel disappointed, or restless, or guilty about the car. Instead I felt something shift. The season had shrunk the world down to this one warm room, this one meal, this one moment of being profoundly, unambitiously still. My partner eventually laughed about the diesel. I think it was the candlelight. Or maybe it was just that October in Orebro gives you permission to be a bit rubbish and calls it hygge, or whatever the Swedish equivalent is.

We fell asleep to the sound of wind in the pines, full of mediocre pasta, and I remember thinking that sometimes you need to get things quite wrong to end up somewhere right.