I have never been very good at reading maps, which is how I found myself reversing down a farm track just outside Kottmannsdorf with a very cross-looking goose staring at me through the windscreen. Three-point turns are challenging enough without an audience, particularly one that honks with what I can only describe as theatrical disdain. My partner sat in the passenger seat making helpful comments like "there's a sign back there" and "maybe don't look at the goose, look at the road," neither of which assisted my dignity or our progress.

We had set off from Vienna that morning in a hire car that smelled faintly of pine air freshener and regret. The motorway gave way to winding roads, which gave way to smaller winding roads, which eventually delivered us to the sort of countryside where you half expect to see Julie Andrews spinning about with a guitar case. Lower Austria does this to you. The hills roll about in a deeply unnecessary fashion, all green and pleased with themselves, and every village looks like it has been recently polished by someone who cares very much about first impressions.

The cottage sat at the end of a gravel drive, half hidden by an apple tree that had dropped fruit across the path in what I initially mistook for a welcome but later recognised as a mild hazard. My partner stepped out of the car and immediately declared that she could hear nothing, which in her world counts as a ringing endorsement. I could hear bees, actually, and the distant clank of what I hoped was a cowbell rather than something agricultural and urgent. We stood there for a moment with our bags at our feet, doing that thing where you breathe in countryside air and try to look like you belong in it.

The key was in a lockbox, which I opened with the code provided in an email I had screenshotted three months previously and promptly forgotten about. Inside, the cottage smelled of wood and clean sheets and that particular stillness that only exists in places where nobody is in a hurry. The kitchen window looked out onto a garden that had clearly been loved by someone with patience and a decent watering can. A wooden table sat under a pergola heavy with something climbing and enthusiastic. I could already picture myself there with a book I would not finish, watching something grow.

My partner disappeared upstairs to investigate the bedrooms while I stood in the kitchen feeling oddly emotional about a bread bin. There is something about holiday cottages that exposes the strangeness of your own life, all the rushing about and screen-staring and eating lunch at your desk. Here was a place that assumed you had time to slice bread properly, to boil a kettle without checking your email, to notice that the afternoon light fell differently on the kitchen tiles at half past three.

I made tea with the terrible bags I had brought from home, carrying my mug out to the garden where a wooden bench faced nothing in particular except some very relaxed-looking shrubs. The goose incident already felt like it had happened to someone else, someone less capable who existed in a different timeline. A cat appeared from somewhere, inspected me briefly, and settled on the warm stones with the confidence of a creature that has never paid rent.

We spent the rest of that first afternoon doing an elaborate amount of nothing. My partner read the same paragraph of her novel approximately eleven times before giving up and closing her eyes. I attempted to identify birds based on a guidebook left on the windowsill, failing comprehensively but enjoying the pretence of expertise. When the sun began to dip behind the hills, turning the garden gold and then grey, neither of us moved to turn on a light. We simply sat there in the gathering dim, slightly chilly, entirely content, listening to the world continue without our assistance.

That evening we walked to the village, which took twelve minutes at a pace that would embarrass a pensioner. We bought bread and cheese from a shop where the woman behind the counter spoke to us in German that we answered in English, everyone understanding nothing and everything simultaneously. Back at the cottage, we ate at that wooden table under the pergola, watching moths investigate the lantern we had hung with excessive optimism. The cheese was excellent. The bread was better. The doing nothing, it turned out, was the entire point.

I have been on holidays where I climbed mountains, visited twelve museums in two days, learned to scuba dive badly in water that was actively trying to kill me. This was not that. This was the holiday where I remembered how to sit still, how to watch a bee work its way through lavender without feeling I should be doing something more productive, how to let an afternoon pass through me like light through a window. The cottage in Kottmannsdorf asked nothing of me except presence, and it took me a full day to realise this was not a failing on my part but a gift.

On our final morning, I stood in the garden with my terrible tea and watched the mist lift from the fields beyond the hedge. The cat returned, or perhaps a different cat, the distinction feeling irrelevant. Somewhere in the village a church bell marked the hour, though I had stopped caring what hour it was. My partner appeared at the kitchen door in her dressing gown, hair flattened on one side from the pillow, looking precisely as rested as I felt. We did not speak. There was nothing that needed saying, and that, I think, was what I had come all this way to find.