The Sat Nav had other ideas about how to reach our cottage in Aubusson, which is how I found myself wedged down a farm track, nose-to-nose with a very unimpressed Limousin cow. My partner sat in stony silence, clutching the A-Z like a talisman, while I attempted a seventeen-point turn that would have made my driving instructor weep. Three fields, one panicked phone call to the owner, and a sheepish reversal later, we finally spotted the stone walls and blue shutters of our holiday home, tucked among trees just outside the village proper.

I had worried that the journey mishap might cast a shadow over the whole week. Instead, stepping out onto the gravel driveway, I felt something in my shoulders drop that I had not realised I was holding. The cottage sat there like a patient old friend, not fussed by our tardiness, not bothered by the cow incident. A wisteria scrambled up one wall, somewhat past its best but still managing to look romantic about it. The owner had left the key under a terracotta pot, alongside a bottle of local red and a handwritten note warning us about the temperamental hot water timer. I loved it instantly.

The garden proved to be the making of that holiday. Not grand, not manicured, but generous and slightly unruly, with a lawn that needed mowing and flower beds that clearly answered to no one. A rusty table and chairs sat beneath a walnut tree, positioned for maximum afternoon shade. By day two I had colonised this spot entirely. I would wander out in my socks with a mug of coffee, settle into the creakiest chair, and simply stop. The silence was not empty; it was full of birdsong, distant church bells, and the occasional tractor drone from somewhere beyond the hedge. I read three novels that week, a personal record for someone whose usual reading happens in five-minute snatches on the Tube.

The cottage itself encouraged this sloth. The kitchen had everything required for simple, lazy meals: cheese from the Saturday market in Aubusson, bread from the boulangerie a short drive away, tomatoes that actually tasted of something. We would eat lunch in the garden, supper at the same rusted table as the light faded, sometimes not bothering with plates proper. The sitting room offered a sofa with precisely the right degree of collapse, positioned before a fireplace we never lit because the evenings stayed mild. I napped there once, embarrassingly, at four in the afternoon, waking to find a cat from goodness-knows-where sitting on my chest, purring with the entitlement of a creature who had never once rushed for a deadline.

There was a small pond at the garden's edge, overgrown with irises, where dragonflies conducted their busy affairs. I spent an hour one morning watching a frog watch me, neither of us achieving much. My partner took to deadheading roses with a concentration I had previously seen reserved for spreadsheets. We spoke less than usual, not from tension but from the relief of having nothing that needed saying.

On our final morning, packing the car with excessive care, I caught myself trying to photograph the garden from every angle, as if I might preserve the feeling of doing absolutely nothing. The cow, mercifully, was nowhere to be seen as we navigated the proper route out, and I felt a strange gratitude for that wrong turn that had started everything, for the reminder that getting lost is sometimes the only way to arrive somewhere worth being.