I have always believed that the best holidays begin with a small disaster, and our trip to Liege proved me absolutely right. My partner and I had spent six hours driving from Kent, through the Channel Tunnel, across northern France, and finally into Belgium with the sort of quiet optimism that only comes from not yet knowing what has gone wrong. It was only as we pulled into a petrol station ten minutes from our destination that I realised my bag, containing both our passports and my only decent pair of shoes, was sitting on a chair in our kitchen in England. I said nothing for a full minute, hoping perhaps that silence would bend reality. It did not.

The Schonberg cottage sits in a quiet residential corner of Liege, not far from the Meuse River, and arriving in a state of frazzled embarrassment felt almost disrespectful to its calm demeanour. I shuffled up the gravel path in borrowed flip-flops, my partner maintaining a heroic silence that spoke louder than any shouting could have managed. But then the door opened, and something shifted. The place smelled of polished wood and something faintly lemony, and through the back windows I could see a garden that seemed to have been waiting specifically for two tired idiots to collapse into it.

We did not collapse immediately, of course. First we performed the ritual inspection that all holidaymakers understand: opening every cupboard, testing the firmness of the mattresses, making approving noises at the coffee machine. The cottage had that rare quality of being properly equipped without trying too hard. No fancy gadgets demanding instruction manuals, just decent knives, a kettle that boiled quickly, and chairs that did not punish you for sitting in them. I found myself gravitating repeatedly to the garden door, drawn by the afternoon light falling across a small terrace and a lawn bordered by hedges that clearly belonged to someone who understood privacy.

The next morning, having accepted that my shoes were irretrievable and that Belgian supermarkets sold acceptable alternatives, we established what would become our routine. Coffee on the terrace, slow and unhurried, watching the garden wake up. The Schonberg's garden is not grand or landscaped to intimidate. It is simply pleasant, green, and still. A robin appeared on the second day and became so regular a visitor that we named him Bernard, though we never established his actual gender. I read three chapters of a novel I had been carrying around for eight months, then fell asleep in a deckchair and woke with Bernard watching me from the fence with what I chose to interpret as approval rather than judgment.

Liege itself offers plenty for the energetic visitor. The steep stairway of Montagne de Bueren, the bustling Sunday market at La Batte, the striking modern railway station designed by Calatrava. We visited none of these things, or at least not with any purpose. Once we wandered down to the riverside and sat on a bench. Another time we found a bakery and bought bread that we ate in the garden with cheese and nothing else. The doing of very little became, gradually, the entire point.

I had worried, before we came, that a cottage holiday without packed itineraries would feel wasteful, as if we were somehow failing to extract maximum value from our time away. This worry now seems to belong to a different person entirely. There is a particular pleasure in waking without plans, in reading until your eyes tire, in watching light move across grass for no reason beyond its own beauty. The Schonberg does not demand activity. It permits rest, which is rarer and more precious than any guidebook experience.

On our final evening, Bernard appeared one last time. I raised my coffee cup to him in farewell, and he flew away without ceremony. We packed slowly, reluctantly, already half-planning our return. My replacement shoes, purchased in a hurry from a shop near the Guillemins area, had molded to my feet through sheer inactivity. The forgotten bag in England had become, by the end, merely a funny story rather than a catastrophe. Some holidays change you through adventure and spectacle. Others, like this one, simply slow you down until you remember how to be still. I cannot recommend the latter highly enough.