I have never been so relieved to see a set of keys taped to the underside of a terracotta pot in my entire life. The journey from Preveza Airport had been straightforward enough, a hire car humming along the coastal road with the windows down and the smell of pine drifting in from the hills. But then I reached Kanali, turned down what I thought was the lane to the cottage, and promptly reversed into an olive grove. Not dramatically, you understand. Just a slow, embarrassing crunch of dry twigs and a sudden realisation that the sat nav had developed a sense of humour.

The actual property sat two hundred metres further on, hidden behind a low stone wall and a hedge of jasmine that had gone slightly feral. I found the keys where the owner said they would be, though I confess I checked three other pots first and briefly considered whether I was being filmed for some sort of holiday blooper programme.

Stepping through the gate was like walking into someone else's Sunday afternoon. The garden was not manicured, not in that anxious English way, but comfortably settled, as if it had simply decided what worked and stuck with it. A lemon tree sagged with fruit near the terrace. A hammock hung between two pines, one rope slightly higher than the other, giving it a permanent suggestion of collapse. I loved it immediately.

The cottage itself was small and square and honest. Terracotta floors that stayed cool even as the afternoon heat pressed down. Wooden shutters that clattered when you opened them. A kitchen with exactly enough equipment to make you feel capable without encouraging anything ambitious. I put my bag down on the bed, which was dressed in white cotton that had been washed to softness, and felt something in my shoulders release that I had not realised I was holding.

I had brought three books, which now seems like excessive optimism. In five days I finished one and a half, and that half-finished novel still sits on my bedside table at home, a bookmark holding my place somewhere in chapter seven, a small memorial to the particular laziness of that week. The reading happened mostly in the hammock, though I never quite solved the lopsidedness and spent most afternoons slowly sliding towards the ground like a patient in a faulty deckchair.

Mornings began without alarm, the light coming through the shutters in stripes. I would make coffee in the small kitchen and carry it to the terrace, where the garden was already busy with insects and the occasional bold lizard. Sometimes I watched the neighbours' cat make its patrol along the wall, pausing to judge me with the frank disdain that only cats and teenagers can properly achieve. I did not mind. I had nowhere to be.

There was a beach nearby, I knew. I walked there once, early on, and it was perfectly pleasant, the Ionian Sea doing its familiar shifting blue. But I found myself returning to the garden, to the particular shade of the lemon tree at midday, to the hammock's gentle threat of collapse. Doing very little requires more practice than people admit. The first day I felt restless, guilty even, checking my phone for updates that did not matter. By the third day I had stopped wearing my watch. By the fifth I could sit on the terrace for an hour watching ants negotiate a crack in the paving and find it genuinely absorbing.

On my final evening I cooked a simple meal from the small shops in Kanali village, tomatoes and cheese and bread that did not need improving. I ate slowly as the light went, the garden turning grey and then silver, the jasmine releasing its sweetness into the cooling air. I thought about the olive grove, my ridiculous arrival, and smiled. Some holidays you remember for what you did. This one I will remember for what I did not do, and how surprisingly difficult, and then how surprisingly easy, that turned out to be.