I'd set off from Salzburg Airport with the smug confidence of someone who'd finally cracked the art of Austrian driving. Left-hand side of the road? Not a problem. Mountain passes? Piece of cake. So naturally, within twenty minutes of leaving the hire car place, I found myself reversing down a farm track near Altenmarkt because I'd followed a sat nav voice that sounded worryingly cheerful about sending me up what was essentially a goat path. Three bewildered cows watched me inch backwards past a barn. I waved. They did not wave back.

By the time I actually reached Grossarl, my knuckles were white and my dignity was in tatters. But then I turned a corner and there it was: a proper wooden chalet-style place tucked into the valley, with flower boxes that looked almost aggressively well-tended. I half expected someone to pop out and present me with a gardening prize.

The owner, a wiry chap called Franz who spoke English with the kind of precision that made me feel sloppy by comparison, handed me the keys and gestured toward the back garden. "For relaxing," he said, as though this needed stating. I nodded gravely, as if relaxation were a serious business I intended to pursue with academic rigour.

And honestly? I absolutely did.

The first morning, I woke to church bells from somewhere down the valley and the particular silence that only exists when you're surrounded by mountains and your own good fortune. I made coffee in the kitchen, which had one of those satisfyingly heavy Austrian coffee pots, and took it outside in my socks. The garden sloped gently down to a hedge, beyond which lay meadows that seemed almost impossibly green, like someone had turned up the saturation on reality itself.

I had brought three books with me, which now strikes me as almost insultingly ambitious. I managed perhaps forty pages of the first one across the entire week. The problem was the garden chair: it reclined just enough, the cushion had that perfect slightly-faded softness, and the afternoon sun hit it at an angle that made reading feel like an active sport I couldn't be bothered with. I'd get through a paragraph, notice a bee negotiating a flower, and that would be twenty minutes gone.

There's a small terrace with a wooden table where I ate breakfast every day. The same breakfast, because why complicate contentment? Bread from the bakery in Grossarl village, cheese, ham, those little cucumber slices the Austrians do so well. I walked down to fetch the bread each morning, a journey of perhaps ten minutes that I stretched to twenty by taking the longer path past the stream. The stream became my project. I decided which rocks looked most comfortable, which bend had the best sound. This is what happens when you stop trying to achieve things.

On the third day, I realised I hadn't checked my phone since arrival. Not as a deliberate digital detox, which would have felt performative, but simply because nothing outside the garden gate seemed particularly urgent. The news would still be dreadful. Emails would still exist. The mountains, meanwhile, were doing something interesting with cloud shadows that demanded my full attention.

I did wander into the village once or twice, enough to establish that Grossarl has everything required for splendid inertia: a decent supermarket, that bakery, a few places serving hearty food I never quite got round to trying because cooking badly with local ingredients felt more satisfying somehow.

By the end, I'd developed an almost spiritual attachment to doing very little in one specific place. The garden chair had moulded to me, or I to it. I'd named the bolder of the garden birds, though I couldn't tell you what species it actually was. Franz waved at me on my final morning, perhaps recognising a fellow convert to the art of deliberate stillness.

Driving back to Salzburg, I caught myself doing thirty in a fifty zone, reluctant to hurry. The sat nav tried to send me up another farm track. I ignored it, smiling.