I have never been so grateful for heated seats in my life. We had been driving up through Schleswig-Holstein for what felt like eternity, the February sky doing that flat grey thing it does so well, when my partner announced he was "sure" he had packed the booking confirmation. Reader, he had not. Cue twenty minutes of silent fuming outside a petrol station in Kappeln while he scrolled through three thousand emails, the Baltic wind finding every gap in my supposedly windproof coat. Romance is not dead, but it was certainly having a lie-down.

By the time we reached Ostseeresort Olpenitz, I was in that peculiar British state of being simultaneously frozen and determined to enjoy myself. The resort sits right on the Schlei fjord, that strange brackish meeting of river and sea, and February had stripped everything back to essentials. No summer crowds, no sailing boats bobbing about, just low dunes, pale reeds rattling in the wind, and water the colour of old pewter. Our apartment was one of the newer ones, all clean lines and enormous windows, and stepping inside felt like entering a different season entirely. Underfloor heating. A kitchen that actually had more than one sharp knife. I stood on the balcony in my socks, watching a heron stand motionless in the shallows, and felt my shoulders finally drop.

The light, though. That was the thing nobody had mentioned. February afternoons in Schleswig-Holstein do not last. The sun, when it bothered, sat low and watery, casting everything in this melancholic gold that made even the mudflats look poetic. I found myself photographing bare branches reflected in puddles, becoming precisely the person I normally mock on Instagram. The short days forced a different rhythm. We walked the beach in the morning while the light held, finding the usual debris of winter storms: twisted wood, the occasional lost buoy, once a whole dead tree that looked like modern art. Then back inside by four, the darkness pressing against those enormous windows, cooking elaborate meals we never bother with at home.

There is something about off-season self-catering that reveals your truest self. In summer you might fling yourself into activities, restaurants, the general performance of holiday-making. In February at Ostseeresort Olpenitz, you are simply left with whoever you arrived with and whatever weather the Baltic decides to offer. We played cards badly. I read an entire detective novel in two days, something I have not done since I was fifteen. My partner attempted a jigsaw puzzle and gave up in a huff. The sauna in the complex became our evening ritual, that particular Scandinavian-German obsession with getting very hot and then very cold, which I resisted at first and then craved with an intensity that slightly alarmed me.

One morning we woke to frost so thick the dunes looked iced, and walked to the harbour at Olpenitz proper, where a handful of fishing boats sat low in the water and an old man in enormous trousers was mending nets with the resigned patience of someone who has done this for forty winters. He nodded at us. We nodded back. It was the most human interaction we had in three days, and it felt sufficient.

I had expected to feel restless, I think. To miss the ease of summer, the long evenings, the possibility of swimming. Instead I found something quieter, something I am still reluctant to name in case it sounds too much like a lifestyle magazine. The season made demands, and in meeting them - the layers, the early darkness, the wind that genuinely made my eyes water - I felt oddly capable. Capable of very little, perhaps, but capable nonetheless.

On our last morning the sun came out properly for the first time, turning the Schlei briefly silver, and we stood on that balcony with coffee cooling in our hands, watching two swans argue about something important. My partner admitted he had enjoyed the jigsaw more than he let on. I admitted I had hidden the last piece so he could not finish without me. We laughed, and the sound carried strangely in the cold air, and then we packed the car and drove south, leaving the heating on full blast and checking the booking confirmation three times.