I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I packed the car keys in the suitcase and the suitcase in the boot. There we were, two hours into the drive to Albaek Strand in North Jutland, ready for our first loo break, and I realised my brilliant organisational skills had backfired spectacularly. My wife just looked at me with that particular expression she has perfected over fifteen years of marriage. The children found it hilarious, of course. Nothing quite like being mocked by an eight-year-old who still cannot tie his own shoelaces.

The journey up through Jutland is actually rather lovely once you stop panicking about locksmith fees. The Danish countryside rolls along in that understated Scandinavian way, all golden fields and tidy farmhouses, punctuated by the occasional wind turbine doing its slow, dignified spin. We eventually liberated the keys at a petrol station near Aalborg, performed an awkward shoe shuffle in the car park, and carried on north with my dignity in tatters.

Arriving at Albaek Strand in the late afternoon felt like stepping into one of those lifestyle photographs that make you irrationally angry on Instagram. The cottage sat among low dunes with the Kattegat glinting beyond, everything bathed in that particular Nordic light that makes ordinary grass look positively poetic. Ours was one of the traditional wooden holiday homes, painted that classic barn red with white trim, the sort of place that practically demands you wear chunky knitwear and drink something mulled.

The first job was getting the fire going, because even in summer the Danish coast has a knack for reminding you that you are, in fact, at roughly the same latitude as southern Alaska. I had brought what I considered to be premium British firelighters and a certain swagger about my fire-making abilities. The Danes, naturally, have designed their wood-burning stoves with elegant efficiency that completely baffled me. Twenty minutes of increasingly desperate puffing later, my daughter calmly read the instructions and had it roaring within ninety seconds. I sat there pretending my smoke-filled eyes were merely emotional about the beauty of our surroundings.

The cottage itself had that wonderful lived-in feeling that proper holiday homes develop over years of family chaos. Slightly mismatched crockery, board games with crucial pieces missing, a sofa with the perfect degree of squishiness for afternoon naps. The kitchen opened onto a small deck where we could sit with our mediocre Danish supermarket wine and watch the light change over the water. My son immediately claimed the loft bedroom, which involved a ladder he was technically too young for but too determined to be dissuaded from.

What struck me most that first evening was the particular quality of quiet. Not silence exactly, because the sea was doing its constant shushing against the shore and there were gulls having opinions about something. But the absence of traffic, of urgency, of the background hum that city life implants in your brain without permission. I found myself actually noticing my own breathing, which sounds terribly zen but was mostly just disconcerting.

We walked down to the beach before bed, the children charging ahead while my wife and I picked our way across the sand in inappropriate footwear. The beach at Albaek is that wonderful Scandinavian combination of pristine and completely unpretentious, all smooth pebbles and clean water and absolutely nobody trying to sell you anything. The children found a piece of driftwood they declared was a sword and immediately fell to squabbling over ownership rights.

That first night, stuffed with hastily assembled pasta and slightly too much wine, I lay in the unfamiliar darkness and listened to the sea. The key fiasco already felt like the amusing anecdote it would become rather than the stress it had been. There is something about these simple coastal places that strips away the performance of ordinary life, leaving you with just the basic pleasure of being somewhere together, slightly chilly, moderately incompetent, and entirely content.