I should have known the holiday had truly begun when I spent twenty minutes trying to unlock the wrong front door. We'd driven up from Calais after the ferry, winding through flat Flemish countryside that looked so unlike the France of postcards, and arrived at our little place in Dunkerque as the afternoon light was turning golden. I was already picturing myself on a garden chair with a book, perhaps a local beer in hand, when I confidently marched up to number thirty-seven and jiggled the key with increasing frustration. My other half stood by the car, arms folded, watching this performance with the patient expression of someone who had noticed the actual house number on our booking confirmation was thirty-nine. The neighbour at thirty-seven opened her window to observe. I waved, attempted a smile that I suspect looked more like a grimace, and shuffled two doors down like a man who had forgotten how to count.

The real house, when I finally found it, was perfect in that unpretentious way that makes you exhale without realising. A proper Flemish cottage, compact and solid, with a small garden at the back that had clearly been loved by someone with more horticultural patience than I will ever possess. There was a wooden table out there, slightly weathered, with chairs that looked like they had supported many slow afternoons. I could already tell this was going to be my headquarters for the week.

We brought our bags in through the narrow hallway, and I immediately clocked the sitting room with its old leather sofa positioned to catch the light. The kitchen was small and practical, the sort where you bump elbows while making coffee but somehow do not mind. Upstairs, the bedrooms were simple, clean, uncluttered by anything unnecessary. I have stayed in holiday rentals that try too hard, all statement wallpaper and curated vintage finds. This place felt like it understood something important: you are here to stop.

And stopping is precisely what we did. The garden became our world. Each morning I would wander out in my slippers with a cup of tea, dew still on the grass, and simply sit. There was a small pear tree that dropped fruit with cheerful irregularity, and I took to reading beneath it with a blanket against the September chill. The book was nothing special, some detective novel I had grabbed at the ferry terminal, but out there it became completely absorbing in a way reading at home never manages. No notifications, no vague sense that I should be doing something productive. Just pages turning and the occasional distant sound of a neighbour's dog.

My other half developed a fondness for the garden's other chair, positioned to catch the afternoon sun, and we fell into an unspoken routine of companionable silence broken only by observations about the weather or requests to pass the biscuits. We had brought a packet of Speculoos from a supermarket in Calais, and they became our official garden snack, consumed with the solemnity of a ritual.

On the second day, I realised I had not checked my phone in hours and felt not the slightest anxiety about this. The garden had worked some gentle magic, narrowing my world to the immediate and the pleasant. We did venture out briefly to the local boulangerie each morning, shuffling along in that particular Dunkerque light that seems to flatten everything into soft tones, but always returned quickly, almost greedily, to our little enclosure.

By the fourth day, I had stopped making plans entirely. There was talk of visiting the beach, perhaps the port museum, but somehow neither happened. The garden table, the pear tree, the slowly shifting sun across the lawn, these became sufficient occupation. I found myself watching a spider rebuild its web between two chairs for a good twenty minutes, an activity I would have found incomprehensibly dull a week earlier.

On our final morning, packing the car, I caught myself trying to memorise the garden, as if I could carry some fragment of its peace home with me. The wrong-door incident already felt like it belonged to another person, someone still caught up in the hurry of ordinary life. I locked the correct door this time, double-checked the number, and drove away slowly, already half-planning our return.