I have never been so happy to see a compost bin in all my life. But I am getting ahead of myself.

The drive from Graz Airport to St Peter am Kammersberg had been nothing short of idyllic. Rolling green hills, the occasional confused-looking cow, and that particular quality of Styrian light that makes everything look like a slightly overenthusiastic postcard. My partner and I were in excellent spirits. We had wine, we had snacks, and we had what I firmly believed to be the correct postcode entered into the sat nav.

Reader, it was not the correct postcode.

We found ourselves at what I can only describe as a very aggressive fork in the road, surrounded by nothing but forest and a profound silence. The sat nav, in that maddeningly calm voice, instructed us to "turn around where possible." There was no possible. There was only forest, regret, and the dawning realisation that I had transposed two digits and sent us twenty minutes in the wrong direction.

What followed was a twelve-point turn on a road barely wide enough for a determined bicycle, during which I may have uttered some words that do not bear repeating. My partner, who has the patience of a particularly zen heron, simply opened another bag of crisps and observed that at least the view was nice. I chose not to find this helpful.

By the time we finally spotted the actual property, tucked among meadows with the Mur Valley stretching below, I was ready to weep with relief. And there, beside the gravel drive, stood the compost bin. I have never identified so strongly with something whose sole purpose is to quietly decompose.

The cottage itself was instantly forgiving. A traditional Styrian farmhouse, solid and unhurried, with wooden beams that looked like they had witnessed several centuries of people arriving in similarly flustered states. We stepped inside to that particular smell of old wood and clean linen, and something in my shoulders dropped about three inches.

I will be honest: we had plans. Hiking routes bookmarked. A list of local attractions. The intention to be, in some vague sense, productive tourists. What actually happened was this.

Morning one, I took a chair into the garden with a book I had been meaning to read for eighteen months. The garden was not manicured, not in that anxious English way. It was simply allowed to be. Wildflowers, herbs, the occasional bee with somewhere important to be. I read perhaps four pages before falling asleep in the sun. Woke with a crick in my neck and absolutely no regrets.

My partner, meanwhile, had discovered the hammock. I use "discovered" loosely. It was right there. But she approached it with the wonder of Columbus, arranged herself with scientific precision, and did not move for what I believe was several hours. At one point I brought her coffee. She opened one eye, smiled, and closed it again. This, I understood, was the entire point.

We developed a routine of magnificent laziness. Breakfast on the terrace, watching the mist lift from the valley. Then nothing. Perhaps a wander to the village for bread, though "village" is generous for St Peter am Kammersberg itself. A handful of houses, a church, the sense that time operates on entirely different principles here. We would return with our bread and cheese and sit in the garden watching the light change, which it does with theatrical slowness in this part of Styria.

I finished my book on day four. I cannot tell you what happened in it. Something about a detective, possibly. What I remember is the particular quality of afternoon light through the apple trees, and the way the silence here is not empty but full, populated by birds and distant cowbells and the wind doing something complicated in the pines.

One evening, watching my partner attempt to identify constellations with absolutely no success whatsoever, I had one of those thoughts that arrive uninvited. About how much of my ordinary life is spent in productive anxiety, in doing things so I can say I have done them. Here, the doing was so minimal it bordered on performance art. And yet I felt more present, more actually myself, than I had in months.

We did walk once, to a nearby meadow. Took perhaps twenty minutes. Saw a deer, which looked at us with the polite confusion of someone interrupted during important deer business. Turned around, came back. That was enough.

The compost bin, I should add, remained a touchstone. Each morning I would pass it on my way to the garden chair, and we would acknowledge each other. Two things simply existing, slowly becoming what we needed to be.