I should have known the sat nav was up to no good the moment it tried to send us through a vineyard. Not alongside one, mind you, straight through the middle, as if our Renault Clio had suddenly sprouted tractor tyres and a fondness for Riesling grapes. My partner, ever the optimist, insisted we "give it a go" for a solid three minutes before the sound of twigs scraping the undercarriage convinced him that technology does not, in fact, know best. We reversed out with the dignity of a supermarket trolley in a strong breeze, me navigating from Google Maps on my phone with roughly 4% battery and a growing sense of panic.

The proper route to Windstein, as we eventually discovered, winds through the Vosges foothills in that gloriously unhurried Alsatian fashion. The village itself sits tucked into a valley near the German border, all timber-framed houses and sleepy charm, the sort of place where you half expect to see a cart horse rather than a car. Our holiday cottage, a traditional half-timbered affair with a steeply pitched roof, peered down at us from behind its wooden shutters like a slightly suspicious grandparent. I loved it instantly.

The owners had left the key in a rusted metal box with a combination that, in my travel-fatigued state, took me four attempts to open. Each failure was accompanied by increasingly theatrical sighs from the driveway, where my partner was unloading cases with the enthusiasm of a man who had just remembered he'd packed three times as many books as pants. The garden, when we finally stumbled through, was an absolute revelation. A proper walled affair, slightly overgrown in that deliberate French way, with a stone terrace and a wrought-iron table that wobbled on uneven paving stones. Beyond it, a small orchard of plum trees dropped fruit onto unmown grass, and somewhere a neighbour's cat watched us with the proprietary air of a local mayor.

I had brought, with magnificent ambition, four novels, a crossword book, and a sketchpad I had not opened since 2019. Within two hours of arrival, I was already horizontal on a faded deckchair with a cup of tea going cold beside me, having read the same paragraph approximately seven times. The afternoon sun moved across the garden with geological slowness. A bee investigated my foot. I did not shoo it. This, I realised with something approaching spiritual clarity, was precisely the point.

The cottage itself smelled of beeswax and old wood, with floors that creaked in specific spots like a memory test. The kitchen had a proper gas hob and a kettle that took an age to boil, forcing you into a state of acceptance I can only describe as aggressively meditative. We bought bread from the boulangerie in nearby Niederbronn-les-Bains, cheese from the supermarket, tomatoes that actually tasted of something. Every meal became an event stretched across hours, eaten outside with wasps for company and no particular urgency to be anywhere else.

I am, by constitution, a person who plans. Holidays previously meant lists, reservations, the anxious ticking of sights seen and experiences optimised. Here, the greatest achievement of any given day was successfully moving from the terrace to the hammock, or perhaps, if feeling particularly dynamic, wandering to the village edge to watch the light change over the forested hills. The first evening, I felt the familiar itch of underachievement, the sense that I ought to be doing something, seeing something, photographing something for later validation. By day three, I had forgotten what day it was. By day five, I no longer cared.

My partner read three books cover to cover, moving only to adjust his position against the afternoon sun. I pottered. I use that word deliberately, with all its British inadequacy, because no other verb captures the aimless pleasure of deadheading geraniums without expertise, of making coffee and forgetting to drink it, of watching swallows trace invisible patterns above the orchard while absolutely nothing was achieved. The garden asked nothing of us. The cottage demanded no improvement. The village continued its centuries-old rhythm regardless of our participation.

On our final morning, I sat with my lukewarm tea and watched mist lift from the meadow beyond the wall. The sat nav sat ignored on the kitchen table, its betrayals forgiven if not forgotten. Somewhere in that week of glorious inertia, I had stopped measuring the holiday by what we had done and started measuring it, simply, by how little we had needed to do at all. We packed the car with excessive care, delaying departure, and drove away through the vineyards the proper way this time, on actual roads, already half-planning our return to precisely the same nothing.