I have never been so pleased to see a sat nav give up on me as I was somewhere outside Quedlinburg last autumn. We had been winding through the Harz for the better part of three hours, my partner navigating with the confidence of someone who once spent a weekend in the Black Forest and considers himself something of an expert on German woodland. The cottage, a proper timber-framed affair in Thale, was supposedly straightforward. It was not. We took a wrong turn near a field of extremely judgmental goats, doubled back past what I am fairly certain was the same judgmental goats, and finally limped onto the lane with the fuel light blazing and my patience hanging by a thread.

Then we saw it. The garden gate. The little terrace with its weathered table. The whole place settled into the hillside like it had grown there, patient and unbothered, waiting for two frazzled Brits to finally stop moving.

I am not too proud to admit that I stood in that garden for a good ten minutes doing absolutely nothing. The autumn air had that particular Harz crispness, the kind that makes your cheeks pink and your lungs feel scoured clean. Behind the cottage, the forest rose in proper Brothers Grimm fashion, all dark pines and sudden clearings. I had packed hiking boots, walking guides, a laminated checklist of local peaks. They stayed in the car for four days.

The cottage itself had that satisfying creak of old timber, the sort that makes you feel properly housed rather than merely accommodated. The kitchen window looked out onto the garden, and I spent an embarrassing amount of my first morning simply standing there with a cup of tea, watching a solitary crow work methodically through the lawn. I have seen worse entertainment at the Edinburgh Fringe, and it cost me nothing.

We had brought books, of course. Armloads of them, the holiday reading we never touch at home because there is always a notification, always a task, always something demanding the fractional sliver of attention we have left. I read three novels in five days, which sounds almost boastful until I confess that two of them were detective stories of questionable literary merit and I do not remember the plots of either. The point was the reading, not the retention. The point was the particular angle of afternoon light through the kitchen window, the way it moved across the pages as the hours dissolved.

My partner developed an attachment to the garden bench that bordered on the concerning. He would disappear after breakfast and I would find him there with his coffee grown cold, watching nothing in particular, occasionally making small observations about the quality of silence that I suspect he thought sounded profound. They did, actually. Or perhaps I was simply too relaxed to argue.

We did venture out once, to the Hexentanzplatz, mostly because the name amused us and we felt we ought to see something. It was perfectly pleasant. We were back by mid-afternoon, slightly footsore, profoundly relieved to reclaim our nothingness.

On the final evening, I sat on that terrace with a glass of wine that cost less than a London pint and watched the last light drain from the treeline. The sat nav sat ignored in the car. The hiking boots had developed a fine coating of dust. I felt something I rarely feel, something I am almost embarrassed to name: contentment without achievement, peace without purpose, the radical pleasure of simply being somewhere and doing nothing worth recounting.

We have talked about returning, though we never quite commit. Perhaps that is the point. Some places you keep in reserve, untouched and perfect, waiting for the moment when you most need to stop.