I have never been one for grand arrivals. Give me a missed turn, a sat nav having a meltdown, and a boot full of snacks I absolutely do not need, and I am in my element. So it was with our recent trip to Steffeshausen, a little village tucked into the hills outside Liege, where we had booked what the website promised was a characterful cottage with a garden worth writing home about.

The journey from Calais had been textbook enough. Motorways, tunnels, the odd service station sandwich. Then, somewhere around Verviers, things took a turn. My partner was navigating, I was driving, and we both became suddenly, stupidly convinced that we knew a better route than the sat nav. We did not know a better route. We knew a worse route. A much worse route. Twenty minutes of increasingly narrow Belgian lanes, one deeply unimpressed local in a Citroen who had to reverse fifty metres for us, and a small existential crisis later, we found ourselves at a dead end outside what appeared to be a mushroom farm. I got out to ask directions. My French, rusty at the best of times, completely deserted me. I managed something like "la maison de vacances, erm, le jardin?" while doing a sort of charade of sleeping and reading that must have made me look unhinged. The farmer, bless him, pointed back the way we had come with the resigned patience of a man who has redirected many lost Britons in his time.

We finally rolled up to the cottage proper an hour late, sweaty, slightly bickering, and in desperate need of the very thing we had come for. Doing absolutely nothing.

And oh, what a place to do it in. The cottage sat at the end of a quiet lane, all soft stone and dark timber, with a garden that sloped gently away towards nothing much at all. Fields, trees, the occasional distant roof. That was the view. That was the whole view. It was perfect. We dumped our bags with the theatrical exhaustion of people who had definitely not just sat in a car for four hours, and I immediately claimed the weathered wooden bench by the back door as my territory for the week.

The first morning set the tone. I woke without an alarm, which never happens, and lay there listening to nothing much. Birds, obviously. Some distant church bells from Steffeshausen itself, maybe. The creak of the cottage settling. By nine I was outside with a cup of coffee that went cold because I forgot to drink it, watching a blackbird work its way through the flower beds with far more purpose than I intended to show all week. I had brought three books, ambitiously, and spent that first morning reading perhaps six pages of the first one before dozing off with it open on my chest. My partner pottered about in slippers, investigating the kitchen with the intensity of someone who might cook something elaborate but probably would not. She did not. We had bread and cheese for lunch, eaten at the rickety garden table, and discussed whether we should perhaps walk into the village later. We did not walk into the village later.

There is a particular pleasure in this kind of holiday that I think I had forgotten. Not the pleasure of achievement, of ticking off sights or restaurants or experiences. The pleasure of subtraction. Of removing everything possible until you are left with sunlight, a slightly uncomfortable chair, and the time to notice how slowly the shadows move across a lawn. I found myself watching a single spider rebuild its web between two lavender bushes for what felt like an hour. I have no idea if it was an hour. I was not checking.

The cottage garden became our whole world. A small terrace for morning coffee, a patch of rough grass where I attempted some half-hearted stretches one day and abandoned them the next, flower beds that someone had clearly loved once and now existed in pleasant, slightly overgrown disorder. We took to moving our chairs to follow the sun like a pair of elderly cats. We spoke less than usual, not because of any tension, but because there simply was not much that needed saying. The books got read, eventually. Slowly. With many interruptions for staring into middle distance.

On our third day, I remember distinctly, I achieved my peak accomplishment. I moved from the bench to a hammock we had discovered strung between two apple trees, and I stayed there through a light rain shower because I could not be bothered to move. The rain was warm. The book was mediocre. The apple trees dripped pleasantly above me. I thought, with the kind of clarity that only comes when your brain has been thoroughly bored into submission, that this was probably enough. That most of my normal life was probably too much. That I should remember this feeling, this specific weight of doing nothing, and carry some version of it home with me. I have not, of course. But I remembered that I thought it, which is something.

We did venture out once, to a bakery in a nearby village for more bread, more cheese, the essential supplies of the determinedly idle. The woman serving us spoke rapid Walloon-inflected French and I understood perhaps every third word, which was fine. We communicated in smiles and pointing. It was enough. Back at the cottage, we returned to our positions like creatures of pure habit. Bench. Hammock. Garden table. The slow rotation of the day.

By the end of the week, I had a sunburn in a strange pattern where the hammock straps had protected my shoulders. I had read two and a half books. I had walked perhaps four miles in total, most of them accidentally while looking for a better spot to sit. We packed up with the usual reluctance, the usual promises to return, the usual stuffing of forgotten items into already-full bags. The drive back was uneventful, sat nav heeded, no mushroom farms visited.

I think about that garden bench sometimes, when the emails are piling up and the calendar looks like a conspiracy against rest. I think about the blackbird, the spider, the warm rain through apple leaves. I think about how lost we got, and how found we were, and how the best holidays sometimes give you nothing to show except a slightly odd tan and the memory of having absolutely nothing to do, and doing it magnificently.