I have never been so grateful for a sat nav in my life, and I have never wanted to throw one out of a moving vehicle quite so much either. The journey to our Pisticci cottage in Basilicata had been going swimmingly until we left the main road, at which point the cheerful voice instructed me to turn onto what I can only describe as a goat track with pretensions. My partner, who had been peacefully dozing, woke up to find us bouncing past olive groves at an angle that suggested we might roll into one at any moment. I gripped the steering wheel and maintained what I hoped was an expression of quiet competence, though the beads of sweat probably gave me away.

The mishap, because there is always one with us, came when I misjudged a tight bend and sent our wheeled suitcase sliding off the back seat. It burst open with a theatrical pop, scattering my pants across the dusty floor of the hire car like some kind of desperate semaphore signal. A local farmer on a scooter passed by at that precise moment, slowed to a crawl, and gave me a look of such profound, unhurried assessment that I felt properly seen for the first time in years. I waved with desperate friendliness. He nodded once, as if filing the encounter away for winter evenings, and puttered on.

The cottage itself materialised through a tunnel of cypress trees, and I immediately forgot about my scattered dignity. It sat there like something from a half-remembered dream, all creamy stone and terracotta roof tiles, with a garden that seemed to have grown itself in a particularly good mood. Bougainvillea scrambled up walls with cheerful abandon. A fig tree dropped its fruit with lazy precision onto a patch of worn grass. Somewhere invisible, a sprinkler ticked and hissed. I stood in the driveway with my arms full of pants and felt something in my chest loosen for the first time in months.

The first forty-eight hours passed in a glorious blur of absolutely nothing. We had brought books, thank goodness, because the cottage seemed to encourage a particular kind of purposeful idleness that I had forgotten existed. I would wake without an alarm, make coffee in the small kitchen with its slightly wonky door, and wander outside to see where the sun had got to. Usually it was doing something flattering to the garden. I would settle into a weathered wooden chair with my novel, read perhaps three pages, and then find myself staring at a lizard on the wall for what felt like an entirely reasonable amount of time.

The garden became my universe. There was a stone table under a pergola where we ate bread and tomatoes so ripe they practically sighed when cut. A hammock appeared on day two, though I have no memory of anyone hanging it, and I spent what I can only describe as a spiritually significant afternoon swaying in it with a book open on my chest, not reading a word. Bees worked the lavender with steady dedication. Swallows cut across the blue in the evenings. I started to notice the particular quality of afternoon light as it moved across the terrace, and I cannot tell you how long it has been since I noticed light at all.

My partner took to watering the potted plants with an intensity that suggested they might fail without this intervention, though they had clearly survived worse. We developed a routine of competitive laziness, each trying to outdo the other in stillness. I won on Wednesday by falling asleep mid-sentence during a conversation about dinner, my head tipped back against the warm stone wall.

There is something humbling about realising how little you actually need to be content. I had arrived with plans, vague notions of drives and sightseeing and productive activity. They evaporated like morning dew. The cottage asked nothing of me except presence, and I found, to my quiet surprise, that presence was something I had been neglecting for years. The farmer on the scooter had understood something I was only now learning: there is a proper pace to things, and it is slower than any of us admit.

On our final morning, I packed the same suitcase with considerably more care, and we bumped back down the track with the windows down. I looked back once. The fig tree was dropping fruit onto the grass, untroubled by our leaving, and I envied it profoundly.