I have always believed that the best holidays begin with a small disaster, and our trip to Altefaehr on Rugen proved me absolutely right. We had been driving for what felt like three days from the ferry, though it was probably closer to five hours, and I was navigating with the confidence of someone who had glanced at a map precisely once. My partner, who was driving, asked whether we needed to turn left at the next junction. I said yes. We ended up in a field. Not a charming field with a helpful signpost, but a proper muddy field with what I dearly hoped was a very large dog watching us from the gate. We reversed out with the dignity of two people who definitely meant to do that, and twenty minutes later we found the actual cottage.

The place sat tucked behind a low hedge, all white plaster and red roof tiles, with a garden that looked like it had been waiting patiently for someone to do absolutely nothing in it. I fell in love immediately. The owner had left the key in a lockbox with a code that I managed to get wrong three times, which my partner found hilarious until he tried it himself and got it wrong twice. We were an excellent team.

Stepping inside, the first thing that struck me was the smell of clean linen and old wood, that particular scent of a cottage that has been properly aired but not stripped of its character. The living room had one of those squashy sofas that practically demands you surrender to it, and windows that looked straight out onto the garden. I could see a wooden table out there, a couple of chairs, and beyond them a patch of grass that needed nothing from me whatsoever. It was perfect.

We did the usual arrival nonsense, of course. Unpacked the bags, established that we had brought approximately fourteen jumpers and no tea towels, argued briefly about which bedroom to take. But even that felt different here, slower somehow, as if the cottage itself was suggesting we might like to calm down a bit. I opened the back door and stood on the step for a while, just listening. Birds, mostly. A distant tractor. The sort of silence that makes you realise how much noise you normally carry around in your head.

The garden became our world for those first few days. We would take our coffee outside in the morning, wrapped in blankets because this was Mecklenburg in early autumn and nobody was pretending it was warm, and we would simply sit. I had brought three books and finished none of them, which I consider a mark of success. There is something wonderfully decadent about reading the same paragraph four times because you keep looking up at the sky instead. The clouds here move differently, I am convinced of it. Slower, broader, as if they too have decided there is nowhere particular to be.

My partner developed a fondness for wandering the perimeter of the garden with his coffee, examining plants he could not identify and had no intention of learning about. I took to a particular chair in the afternoon sun, a slightly wonky wooden affair that creaked when I shifted my weight. We spoke less than we normally do, not because we were bored or uncomfortable, but because there seemed so little that needed saying. The garden filled the gaps.

On our third day, I realised I had not checked my phone in twenty-four hours. This discovery caused me a moment of genuine panic, followed by a strange, giddy relief. What was I missing? Nothing that mattered. The world continued its frantic business elsewhere while I sat in a garden in Altefaehr, watching a blackbird work its way across the lawn with the focused intensity of someone who actually had somewhere to be.

We did venture to the village once, a short stroll that took us past fields and the odd farmhouse, to a small shop where we bought bread and cheese and felt terribly local. But mostly we stayed put. We cooked simple meals in the kitchen, ate at that wooden table outside when the weather allowed, and retreated to the sofa when it did not. One evening it rained properly, the kind of steady German rain that drums on the roof and makes you feel clever for being indoors. We lit candles, played cards badly, and I fell asleep before nine.

I think what I loved most was the permission the place gave us to be unremarkable. No sights to tick off, no photographs to stage for other people, no story to bring home except that we had been very still for a while and it had been enough. The cottage asked nothing of us except to occupy it gently, to leave it much as we found it, to maybe water the geranium on the windowsill if we remembered. We remembered about half the time. It survived.

On our last morning, I sat in my wonky chair with a cup of tea that had gone cold, and I felt something I rarely feel at home. Contentment, I suppose, though that sounds too grand. It was smaller than that. A sense that I had caught up with myself somehow, that the person I was in this garden was not so different from the person I wanted to be. My partner came out with fresh tea, sat on the grass with his back against the wall, and we watched a squirrel make a complete hash of getting into the bird feeder. Neither of us moved to help.

Driving away, I caught myself planning our return before we had even reached the main road. Same cottage, same garden, same glorious nothing. I have never been so excited about the prospect of doing so little again.