The train from Stockholm had been one of those journeys that starts feeling romantic and ends feeling like you've been gently shaken in a tin for two hours. I'd packed with the confidence of someone who definitely hadn't checked the weather, and by the time I stepped onto the platform at Orebro Central, my enthusiasm was only slightly dampened by the realisation that I'd left my proper walking boots on the kitchen table in Croydon. Still, I told myself, how rugged could a Swedish forest lodge really be?

I'd arranged to pick up the hire car in town, which seemed straightforward enough until I discovered that my brain had been running on autopilot and I'd been driving on the left for a good three minutes before a helpful local on a bicycle gestured at me with the kind of alarmed politeness that only Scandinavians can really pull off. I waved apologetically, moved over, and spent the rest of the drive gripping the steering wheel like it owed me money.

The road to Kopparberg unwinds through proper pine forest, the sort that makes you feel like you've wandered into a slightly melancholic children's book illustration. I passed the odd red wooden house, smoke curling from chimneys, and started to relax into the rhythm of it. Then my phone decided this was the perfect moment to announce it had no signal whatsoever. Of course it did. I'd been relying on GPS rather than, say, basic human preparation like writing down directions. There followed twenty minutes of increasingly tense driving, during which I passed the same distinctive boulder no fewer than three times and began to genuinely wonder if I'd stumbled into some sort of Nordic time loop.

I found the turning eventually, mostly by recognising a particular bend in the road where I'd earlier done my second illegal left-side manoeuvre. The track to the property crunched satisfyingly under the tyres, gravel and pine needles, and then the lodge appeared through the trees and I actually said "oh" out loud, alone in the car, like a complete prat.

It was one of those traditional Swedish timber houses, deep red with white trim, the sort that looks like it should have a friendly gnome tending the garden. The forest pressed close on three sides, proper mature pine with that particular quality of silence that only comes when you're genuinely away from everything. I turned off the engine and just sat there for a moment, listening to nothing much at all, feeling the particular foolishness of having rushed and stressed and nearly caused an international incident over lane positioning.

The key was where promised, in a little lockbox that required the sort of fumbling in cold weather that makes you feel about ninety. I got inside eventually, door creaking with that satisfying weight of something properly built, and the smell hit me immediately - wood smoke and pine and that clean, slightly sweet scent of old timber. The living room had one of those wood-burning stoves that dominates everything, black iron and serious-looking, and enormous windows looking straight out into the forest. I could see a deer trail through the trees, the undergrowth pressed down in that particular way, and something about it made me feel I'd been let in on a secret.

I made the obvious discovery that there was no firewood by the stove, then the equally obvious follow-up that there was a substantial woodshed around the back, which I found by nearly tripping over a root in my wholly inadequate trainers. The first attempt at lighting the fire was humbling, all smoke and no flame, but the second caught properly and I sat there with a cup of tea that tasted better than any tea has a right to, watching the light fade through those enormous windows and feeling something unknot in my chest that I hadn't realised was tight.

The mishaps felt properly distant now, almost fond. The wrong-side driving, the circular detour, the boots left behind in a different country entirely. They'd brought me here, hadn't they? To this particular quiet, this particular moment of being very small in a very large forest, with a fire catching properly at last and the darkness gathering beyond the glass like something friendly waiting to be introduced.