I should have known the satnav was up to no good when it tried to send us down what looked like a tractor's lunch break. There we were, three hours from Calais, winding through the Champagne-Ardenne countryside with two children asking if we were there yet and a boot full of cheese we definitely did not need from the hypermarket. The mishap came at a village called something unpronounceable, where I turned left with tremendous confidence and found myself face to face with a very closed, very metal farm gate. Reversing a laden estate car down a single-track lane with a stone wall on one side and a ditch full of suspicious water on the other is not, I can confirm, the holiday highlight I had planned. My wife found it considerably funnier than I did, which I suppose is marriage in miniature.

We arrived at the Flaignes Havys cottage in something of a state. The children were sticky, I was muttering, and the cheese had begun to assert itself in the confined space. But stepping out onto the gravel drive, the whole sorry journey fell away rather quickly. The place sits in proper rural France, not the postcard version with geraniums and accordion music, but the real deal: rolling fields, a silence broken only by birds having opinions, and that particular quality of light that makes you feel you have accidentally wandered into an Impressionist painting. The cottage itself is stone and sensible, with a covered terrace where we immediately deposited our bags and stood about feeling pleased with ourselves.

The first evening was spent in that particular chaos of family self-catering. Someone had forgotten the washing-up liquid, which we discovered only after generating a spectacular mountain of plates. The local shop, a few minutes drive in what I now understood to be the correct direction, provided salvation along with a bottle of local champagne that cost embarrassingly little. We sat on that terrace as the light faded, the children finally horizontal with exhaustion, and I found myself reflecting on how thoroughly I had misjudged what I needed from a break. I had packed books I would not open, planned day trips we would not take, and all the while the thing itself was simply this: being somewhere else, together, with nothing particular required of any of us.

The cottage had a proper fireplace, which the children treated with the reverence usually reserved for religious artefacts, and a garden where they could run in circles until gravity claimed them. The nearest village offered nothing in the way of entertainment by design, which proved to be the entertainment. We walked lanes bordered by hedgerows heavy with blackberries, the children complaining heroically until they discovered the eating part. A small lake nearby provided an afternoon of throwing stones and failing to skim them, which my son considered a tremendous success.

By the third day we had settled into a rhythm of magnificent slowness. Breakfast stretched until mid-morning, walks were abandoned when they ceased to be pleasant, and the covered terrace became our headquarters for reading, card games, and the occasional nap that was definitely not a nap. I caught my wife smiling at nothing in particular, and recognised it as the particular smile of someone whose shoulders had finally descended from somewhere near her ears.

The cheese, incidentally, was excellent. We ate it all, without a single regret.