And who should turn up again, offering me an all-expenses mystery tour to Oslo for the summer solstice? Olivia Jouval and Metamuse, of course. I don’t know what she wants, and why she wants it from me. (And I say ‘she’ not ‘them’, because the invitation was signed by Olivia Jouval alone. All along I’ve felt more compelled by Jouval, as if she’s the driving creative force behind the company; it’s her protean face I see shifting in my dreams.) There are a hundred out-of-work reviewers available, some of whom write better than me. But I come along, on her assignment – I’ve got nothing else to do, have I? I feel like John the Baptist – a prophet, an apocalyptic messenger, preparing the ground for Olivia’s arrival.

* * *

The fifty audience members of tonight’s show were rounded up outside the Parliament Hotel and it takes an hour in the bus to Fjellstrand, a little suburban village across the water. Wordlessly, we’re led into a forest. Though the map on my phone tells me the patch of trees is only a couple of hundred metres across, the woods are primal and dark and terrifying. Ten metres into the trees, the midsummer glare on this sunny night is completely snuffed and the jovial tour-bus chatter has fallen into a cautious murmur.

In the scented dark, we’ve left the scrap of civilisation that clings to the rocks far behind. We could be in a different century; there’s the sense in all our primitive brains that our ancestors were hunted in forests like this, by monsters we like to believe no longer exist.

We come to a clearing and are greeted softly by a man and two women dressed in pagan robes, flower crowns in their hair. The moment we’re issued with the plain white robes to wear (over our clothes, to my relief), I find myself looking for the wicker man. I can tell from the nervous grins around me that I’m not the only one who’s watched too many films and is worried about being a human sacrifice.

They need virgins, don’t they? How exactly do they define a virgin in Fjellstrand? Untouched by man? Or untouched by the Devil?

* * *

I’m a little reassured when we’re led out into the sun on a hilltop laid with colourful blankets and cushions, and share a picnic of bread and cheese and fruit and wine. The hosts play drums and tambourines and encourage the audience to sing along. We’re a terribly clean, terribly polite, terribly bourgeois bunch of hippies.

Next, we’re taught how to weave straw dolls and make floral headbands. Not really what I came to Norway to do – I could do crafts like this in my new home village’s community centre on Tuesday mornings. But this is Metamuse.