I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I got us lost before we'd even left the motorway. There I was, proudly navigating with my phone, and somehow managed to direct us into a car park full of lorries at a service station just past Hamburg. My partner gave me that look. You know the one. The "we've been together twelve years and you still can't tell east from west" look. Forty minutes of muttering and a very expensive coffee later, we were back on track, heading north towards Schleswig-Holstein and the Feriendorf Wardersee.

The drive through the flat green landscape was exactly what my frazzled brain needed. Fields, wind turbines, the occasional cow giving us a judgmental stare. By the time we turned onto the smaller roads near Wardersee, I could feel my shoulders dropping from somewhere up round my ears to their proper position.

The Feriendorf itself appeared through the trees like one of those places you see on postcards and assume must be Photoshopped. Little wooden cottages with red roofs, neatly arranged around grassy areas, all looking out towards the lake. Ours was number fourteen, and I immediately decided it was the best one, though I suspect I would have said that about any of them. The key was in a lockbox, which of course I couldn't open at first, fumbling about while a German family across the way watched with the polite amusement of people who had managed their own lockbox on the first try.

Stepping inside, the smell hit me. That particular combination of wood and clean linen and something faintly nostalgic that I can never quite name. The cottage was simple in the best possible way. A small kitchen with everything you actually need and nothing you don't. A living area with windows that looked straight out onto our little garden. Upstairs, two bedrooms under sloping ceilings that my tall partner immediately bumped his head on, which I found disproportionately funny after the stress of the journey.

I dumped my bag and went straight to the sliding doors. The garden was modest, maybe fifteen metres of grass bordered by hedges, with a wooden table and chairs that had seen better days. A single apple tree stood in the corner, already dropping early fruit onto the lawn. Beyond the hedge, I could glimpse the water of Wardersee itself, grey and calm under the afternoon clouds.

That first day, we did almost nothing. I mean properly nothing. We sat in those slightly wobbly garden chairs with mugs of tea that went cold because we forgot about them. I had brought three books and started none of them, too busy watching a blackbird work its way across the lawn, stopping to give each fallen apple the thorough examination it deserved. My partner dozed off with his newspaper on his lap, and I didn't move to wake him. The light changed slowly, the way it does when you're not rushing anywhere, shifting from afternoon gold to something softer and more forgiving.

I kept thinking I should unpack, or plan something, or at least walk down to the lake. But there was a peculiar stubbornness to my laziness that day. A refusal to let the holiday become another list of activities to complete. The cottage had a small television we never turned on. There was WiFi, apparently, though I didn't bother finding the password. The world beyond our little hedge felt very far away, and I wanted to keep it there.

As evening came, we walked the fifty metres or so to the lakeshore proper, more because our legs were stiff from driving than from any real ambition. The water lapped gently against the reeds. A few other cottages had lights on now, but nobody was making much noise. It struck me that this was the sound I had been missing without knowing it. Not silence exactly, but the absence of urgency.

We ate bread and cheese for dinner because the supermarket could wait until morning. Sat in the garden until it got properly dark, which takes longer than you think in a German summer. I felt slightly guilty about my lack of productivity, my failure to even start a book or plan a proper walk. Then I realised that was precisely the point. That doing very little, deliberately and without apology, was what I had come here to learn again.

The apple tree rustled in a small breeze. Somewhere, a duck complained about something. I finished my tea, finally, and went to bed early, still slightly lost, still not quite sure where east was, and not caring in the slightest.