I should have known the holiday had truly begun when I managed to leave my suitcase on the ferry. Not lose it, mind you. Just calmly walked off without it, like a man who has decided to live entirely in the clothes he stands up in. The staff at Bojden-Fynshav were terribly polite about it, which somehow made the whole thing worse. By the time I retrieved it, my wife had that particular look she gets when she realises she is, once again, the only functioning adult in our family unit.

The drive to Mommark Strand was mercifully short, winding through Als's patchwork of fields and those tidy Danish farmhouses that make you feel slightly ashamed of your own guttering. We spotted the sea glinting between the trees, and suddenly the ferry fiasco felt properly behind us. The cottage sat in a modest cluster of similar places, all timber and sensible Scandinavian angles, with a garden that sloped down towards the water. My daughter immediately declared it "the holiday house" in the possessive tone of a seven-year-old who has already mentally moved in.

The key was in the lockbox as promised, though I spent a solid five minutes trying to open it while a neighbour watched from his deck with the amused patience of someone who has seen this performance many times. The door swung open to that particular smell of pine and cleaning products and slightly damp holiday home that I find inexplicably comforting. The living area was open-plan in the way that sounds aspirational but mainly means you can see every mess you've made from every angle. A wood-burning stove sat in the corner looking optimistic about its chances of being needed in August.

My son made straight for the loft bedroom, which he claimed by simply throwing his stuffed rabbit onto the upper mattress. Territorial disputes were already brewing. The kitchen was compact and alarmingly well-organised, with labelled drawers that felt like a personal rebuke to our chaotic cupboards at home. I opened one to find a cheese slicer, which I took as a sign that Denmark expected better from me.

Within an hour, the cottage had that particular energy of a family unpacking with more enthusiasm than system. Sandals in the kitchen drawer. Toothpaste somehow on the bathroom mirror before anyone had officially brushed. My wife had established her base camp on the wooden terrace with a cup of tea, watching the children discover that the garden path led directly down to a small beach. The water was that calm, grey-green of the Baltic on a mild day, and a couple of kayakers were paddling past with the effortless competence that Scandinavians seem to absorb from childhood.

I joined her with a second cup, still slightly winded from the ferry episode and the general exertion of Being On Holiday. The sun was doing that low, golden thing it does in late summer, turning the grass luminous and making the whole place feel temporarily perfect. My daughter appeared with a handful of pebbles she intended to keep forever. My son was missing, presumed to be exploring the shoreline with the single-minded focus he applies to everything except homework.

We had not planned anything ambitious for this break. The cottage had promised simple things: a terrace, a garden, proximity to water. Already I could feel the particular relief of a holiday with no cultural obligations, no sights to tick off, just the modest project of being somewhere else together. Tomorrow we might cycle to a nearby village, or we might not. We might cook elaborate meals, or we might eat bread and cheese on the beach and call it dinner. The wood-burning stove would almost certainly remain unlit, but its presence was reassuring, a possibility held in reserve.

As evening came on, the light turned properly spectacular, painting the water in stripes of rose and grey. The children were filthy and happy, full of fresh air and the particular exhaustion that comes from doing very little very hard. My wife and I sat with our third cups of tea, not talking much, watching a heron work its way along the shoreline with the deliberate patience of something that has never once left its luggage on a ferry.

I thought about how we would remember this: not as a dramatic holiday or an impressive one, but as a week of small, accumulated pleasures. The creak of the terrace boards. The way the light fell through the pine trees. The particular silence of a Danish evening by the sea. And, inevitably, the story of the suitcase, which would improve with each retelling until I had almost left it on purpose, as a comic gesture, a holiday ritual.

The heron took flight, slow and unhurried, and somewhere inside the cottage a child was laughing about something I would never fully understand. I finished my tea, cold now, and went to see about supper.