Getting to Bornholm was meant to be straightforward. Fly from Copenhagen, pick up the hire car, follow the sat nav to our little summer cottage in Sommerodde. What actually happened was that I spent twenty minutes trying to unlock a stranger's shed in Nexo because I'd written the wrong house number on my phone, while my wife sat in the car pretending she didn't know me and the children asked if this meant we were going to prison. The shed owner, a lovely chap called Henrik, found the whole thing so amusing he gave us a bag of freshly picked cherries, which immediately exploded all over the back seat when our youngest sat on them. Holiday magic, right there.

The real Sommerodde cottage, when we finally found it, sat tucked among pines with a proper old-fashioned thatched roof and weathered timber walls that looked like they'd weathered every Baltic storm since the fifties. I stood there with cherry-stained hands and felt that particular mix of relief and mild dread that comes with self-catering. You know the feeling. The brochure said "rustic charm." My wife said it looked like where Hansel and Gretel would meet their end. The children just wanted to know if there was Wi-Fi.

There was, as it happened, though it worked at approximately the speed of a tired snail. We decided this was a feature, not a bug.

Stepping inside, that first impression was all low ceilings, creaking floorboards, and the particular smell of a place that's been closed up since last summer. Not unpleasant, exactly. Just very present. Like opening your gran's airing cupboard if your gran lived in Scandinavia and believed in minimalism. The kitchen was compact in that way that makes you bump hips with anyone else trying to make tea, which we did repeatedly while laughing like teenagers and then immediately bickering about who'd forgotten the milk. Standard arrival day behaviour, I think.

The garden sloped down toward rocky outcrops and glimpses of the Baltic, close enough that you could hear the water if you stood still and the wind cooperated. Our lot did not stand still. They were off exploring before I'd even wrestled the suitcases through the narrow doorway, discovering a hammock that spun one of them into a bush and a barbecue that looked like it had last been used during some significant historical period. I made a mental note to buy lighter fluid and possibly a small fire extinguisher.

That first evening, we walked the couple of minutes down to the nearest proper beach at Balka Strand, sandy and shallow and scattered with other families doing exactly what we were doing: letting the children run off their travel energy while the adults stared at the horizon and pretended this was profoundly meaningful rather than simply knackering. The water was that particular Baltic grey-green, bracing even in July, though our two insisted on paddling until their feet turned alarming colours.

Back at the cottage, we cooked badly using unfamiliar hobs, drank wine from plastic cups because I couldn't find the proper ones in the dim light, and sat on the little wooden terrace wrapped in blankets as the sky did that long, slow Scandinavian fade to grey that never quite gets properly dark. Someone, I think me, mentioned how peaceful it was. Someone else, definitely one of the children, was sick from eating too many of Henrik's cherries.

I watched a moth the size of a small aircraft batter itself against the window and thought about how we'd arrived chaotic and stained and slightly lost, how the cottage demanded we slow down whether we liked it or not, how family holidays are never quite the serene idyll you imagine but somehow better for that. The Wi-Fi dropped out completely. Nobody noticed for nearly an hour.