The thing about driving to Falster is that you genuinely forget Denmark has islands. You are bowling down the motorway, smug with your pre-trip coffee and your playlist of questionable noughties hits, and then suddenly there is water and a bridge and a mild panic about whether you have enough petrol to become a maritime disaster. We had left Copenhagen at a civilised hour, full of optimism and a bag of pastries that had somehow fused into one enormous laminated lump. By the time we reached Gedesby, that optimism had curdled slightly, and the pastries had achieved the structural integrity of floorboard.

The sat-nav had been doing something passive-aggressive for the last twenty minutes, insisting we were "arriving" while simultaneously directing us past identical fields of what I now believe was either wheat or extremely organised grass. My partner was driving with that particular jaw set that meant she was being brave about my navigation skills. I was being brave about her braking. The cottage, when we finally found it, sat down a narrow lane with the quiet confidence of somewhere that had seen many couples arrive in precisely this state of mild marital tension.

Here is where I must confess the mishap. In my eagerness to stretch my legs and assert some masculine competence after three hours of being a passenger, I grabbed what I believed to be our "essentials" bag and marched to the door with the key code clutched in my hand. The door opened with a satisfying click. I stepped inside, triumphant, and realised I was holding the bag of fused pastries. The actual essentials - phone chargers, the proper check-in instructions, my trousers for the morning - remained in the car. I had prioritised laminated Danish pastry over clothing. This, I thought, standing in a stranger's hallway with a bag of baked cement, was probably worth examining in my next life review.

But the cottage, bless it, absorbed my nonsense without comment. The first thing that struck me was the smell - that particular Scandinavian combination of wood and sea air and something faintly lemony that makes British holiday lets smell of, well, disappointment by comparison. The living area opened up with those enormous windows that Danes seem to consider a human right, and through them rolled the flat green landscape of Falster, punctuated by nothing much at all except the distant glint of what I later learned was the Baltic.

I should mention the heating. Having spent years in British cottages where the central heating operates on a schedule known only to ancient druids, I flicked the Danish system on and was immediately engulfed in warmth so efficient it felt almost aggressive. Within minutes I had removed three layers and was considering my vest. This, combined with the pastry situation, left me slightly lightheaded and inexplicably emotional.

My partner returned from the car with the actual bags and found me standing in my socks, holding a cup of something from the well-appointed kitchen, staring at a field. "There's a deer," I said, though there was not. There was, however, a profound sense of having arrived somewhere that understood the value of doing things properly without making a fuss about it.

The evening light came sideways across the fields, and we sat with the windows open to that strange flat silence of the Danish countryside, broken only by birds I could not identify and the occasional distant agricultural machine that sounded like a contented tractor. I thought about my fused pastries, my abandoned trousers, my general unsuitability for efficient Nordic living. Then I stopped thinking, because the cottage had a deck, and the deck had chairs, and the chairs had somehow arranged themselves to face precisely where the sun intended to set.

We did not move for some time.