I have never been very good at reading maps. Sat navs, I can manage. A friendly voice telling me to turn left in three hundred yards suits me perfectly fine. But my other half had this romantic idea that we should navigate the old-fashioned way through the Harz, just for the fun of it. Reader, it was not fun.

We had been driving for the better part of six hours, winding our way up from the ferry with our boot stuffed full of books and biscuits and far too many jumpers. The Harz mountains rose around us, all dark pine and sudden mist, and I will admit it looked properly atmospheric. Like the opening of a film where someone discovers an ancient secret. In reality, we discovered nothing except that I had been holding the map upside down for a solid forty minutes. My other half noticed when I confidently directed us towards Quedlinburg instead of Thale, which is rather like aiming for Cornwall and ending up in Kent. We had a good laugh about it once the muttering stopped.

By the time we found the cottage, I was ready to collapse into the nearest soft furnishing and remain there until spring. The place sat tucked along a quiet lane just outside Thale, a proper wooden-beamed affair with a garden that looked like someone had spent years getting it just right. There were climbing roses, a little patio with weathered chairs, and beyond the fence nothing but trees and the faint suggestion of hills fading into grey-green distance. I stood there with my ridiculous upside-down map still clutched in my hand and felt something in my chest loosen. The mishap, the wrong turns, the six hours of motorway tedium, it all suddenly seemed worth it for this.

The first morning, I woke to birds making an absolute racket and the smell of pine coming through the open window. Someone, presumably a previous guest with more energy than sense, had left a stack of novels in the living room. I picked up a dog-eared crime paperback and took it outside with my coffee. The patio chairs were slightly damp, which I discovered only after sitting down, but I could not be bothered to move. I read three chapters with a wet bottom and considered it a small price to pay.

We did walk into Thale proper that afternoon, a pleasant wander of maybe twenty minutes through lanes that smelled of cow parsley and woodsmoke. The village sits at the foot of the Bodetal gorge, all dramatic cliffs and rushing water, and we stood on the little bridge watching the stream tumble past while an elderly German man walked his dog past us three times, clearly on some established route that predated our arrival by decades. We bought bread and cheese and some rather good local beer from a small shop near the church, then turned straight back for the cottage. The gorge could wait. The witches' dancing place on the Brocken could wait. Everything could wait.

That became the pattern of the week, if you could call something so unstructured a pattern. Mornings in the garden with books and terrible coffee I made too weak. Afternoons dozing in the chair that got the best sun, waking up with page creases on my cheek and no idea what time it was. My other half took to doing the crossword with a pencil so blunt it barely marked the paper, muttering and occasionally asking me for a six-letter word for "mountain pool" that I never knew. We ate simple meals, bread and cheese and tomatoes from the garden of the cottage next door, left on our step by a neighbour we never properly met.

I had brought running shoes with the vague intention of proper exercise. They stayed in the car. I had downloaded podcasts about German history to enrich my mind. I listened to none of them. The books I had packed with such ambition, the thick literary novels I always mean to get through, they went largely untouched in favour of that terrible crime paperback I found on the shelf, which I read twice through for lack of anything better.

There is a particular pleasure in doing very little in a place that does not judge you for it. The Harz in summer does not demand performance. It does not care if you have not hiked to the highest peak or visited every half-timbered town within driving distance. The trees keep growing. The stream keeps rushing. The garden keeps being quietly, determinedly beautiful whether you are achieving anything or not.

On our last evening, I sat in that damp chair with my third beer and watched the light change over the hills. My other half had fallen asleep with the crossword abandoned on their chest. A blackbird was making that falling, fluting call they do at dusk. I thought about all the holidays where I had rushed about, ticking boxes, coming home more tired than I left. This had been different. This had been necessary.

We packed the car in a lazy fashion the next morning, leaving later than planned, which meant another wrong turn or two before we found the main road. I did not even open the map. Some things, I have learned, are better left to chance and satellite navigation.