I should have known the Schleswig-Holstein weather would have the last laugh. There I was, smug as anything, having packed what I genuinely believed was a sensible case for a late September stay at Feriendorf Wardersee. Lightweight jacket, one jumper just in case, sunglasses perched optimistically on my head. The satnav had behaved itself all the way from Hamburg, and I was feeling rather pleased with my organisational prowess. Then I opened the car door.

The wind off Wardersee lake did not so much greet me as interrogate me. It found every gap in my clothing, every optimistic decision I'd made back in my warm kitchen a week prior. My sunglasses promptly blew off my head and skittered across the gravel parking area, coming to rest against a wheelie bin with what I can only describe as theatrical finality. A woman walking her dog observed this with the polite neutrality that north Germans have perfected over centuries. I gave her a thumbs up. She nodded, once, and carried on. I have never felt more British.

The journey itself had been a slow unwinding, the kind that proper holidays require. The motorways gave way to A-roads, then to lanes where the hedgerows grew taller and the light took on that particular flat, silvery quality that comes with autumn in this corner of Germany. The fields were stubbled gold, the harvest mostly in, and the trees had begun their annual argument about whether to turn properly or hold out for one more week of green defiance. Schleswig-Holstein in late September does not shout about its beauty. It mutters, and you have to lean in to hear it.

Feriendorf Wardersee announced itself with wooden signage and a cluster of low buildings that managed to look both purpose-built and somehow settled, as if they had grown there rather than been assembled. The reception area was warm, mercifully, and the woman behind the desk handed over my key with the efficiency of someone who had seen many arrivals, many of them underdressed. I made some comment about the wind. She smiled and said, "The lake makes its own weather." I have thought about this phrase approximately forty times since. It has the ring of a local proverb, or perhaps a gentle warning.

The cottage was one of a terraced pair, modest and clean-lined, with a small terrace area that in summer would presumably host barbecues and late evenings with wine. Now, in the grip of this transitional season, it felt more like a viewing platform for the elements. I stood there with my cup of tea - proper Yorkshire, brought from home in a tin because some things are not negotiable - and watched the lake surface shiver under the wind. A few brave sailboats were out, their crews in proper waterproofs, doing whatever it is that sailing people do when the rest of us are sensibly indoors. I admired them without wanting to join them. This is my relationship with most outdoor pursuits.

What struck me, that first afternoon, was how the season seemed to have stripped everything back to essentials. The holiday park was quiet, not empty but unhurried. No children shrieking from the small swimming pool, no evening barbecues sending smoke signals across the grounds. Instead, there was the creak of the trees, the distant sound of someone hammering something in a shed, the occasional purposeful walk of a resident in wellies and a coat that had seen proper use. The lake itself had that particular autumn colour, neither blue nor grey but something suspended between the two, waiting for winter to make its decision.

I found myself, unexpectedly, grateful for the wind that had humiliated me. Without it, I might have treated this as a summer holiday gone slightly wrong, rather than what it actually was: something else entirely. A different rhythm. The heating in the cottage worked beautifully, and there was something almost illicitly satisfying about closing the curtains against the early dark, about cooking a simple dinner while rain began against the windows, about the particular silence of a lakeside evening when the summer crowds have gone and the winter ones have not yet arrived.

That first night, I slept better than I had in months. The wind became a kind of lullaby, or perhaps I was simply tired enough not to mind. Either way, I woke to mist on the water and the realisation that I had brought entirely the wrong clothes, that I would need to find a proper outdoor shop somewhere nearby, and that none of this mattered as much as I had thought. The season had already begun its work, stripping away my expectations along with the leaves, leaving something simpler underneath.