I have never been very good at ferries. There is something about the combination of my terrible sense of direction and moving vehicles that guarantees disaster, and our trip to Forio on Ischia was no exception. We had driven down through Campania from Naples, full of excitement about our week in a proper Italian cottage, and I had spent the entire journey banging on about how I was going to do absolutely nothing. No sightseeing, no rushing about, just me and a book and perhaps a tomato.

The mishap came at the port. I was so busy pointing at Vesuvius in the distance and telling my partner about the Roman bakeries of Pompeii, which we were definitely not visiting, that I marched us onto the wrong ferry entirely. We ended up heading towards Procida. Procida, I should note, is lovely. We did not stay to find out. Twenty minutes of frantic Italian from my partner, some theatrical hand gestures from the crew, and a rather sheepish return journey later, we finally arrived at Ischia proper. I decided then and there that my doing-nothing holiday would begin with doing nothing competently. No more navigation. No more ambition of any kind.

The cottage sat on the western side of the island, in Forio, and the moment we stepped through the gate I felt my shoulders drop about three inches. The garden was the first thing that hit me. Not literally, though I did nearly walk into a lemon tree while gawping at the bougainvillea. There were terracotta pots everywhere, heavy with geraniums and herbs I could not name, and a small terrace with a table that looked as though it had hosted several decades of slow lunches. I immediately pictured myself there, doing my nothing, and felt deeply satisfied with my future self.

Inside, the place had that particular stillness of somewhere that has been lived in properly. Wooden beams, tiled floors that stayed cool underfoot, windows that opened onto the garden with satisfying creaks. I put my bag down and promptly forgot where I had left it. This became a theme of the week. The cottage was not large, but it had the wonderful trick of feeling bigger than it was because every corner opened onto greenness. Even the kitchen window framed a view of climbing jasmine that made washing up, theoretically, almost pleasant. I say theoretically because I did no washing up. My partner did, while I supervised from the garden with a book.

That first afternoon set the pattern. I found a deckchair that seemed to have moulded itself to the human form through years of dedicated use, and I did not leave it for four hours. I read perhaps six pages of my novel. The rest of the time I spent watching a lizard watch me, listening to distant church bells, and wondering whether I needed another glass of the local wine. I did. I always did. The garden had several levels, little terraces stepping down, and I developed a routine of moving my deckchair between them depending on where the sun had got to. This was the extent of my physical activity. Once, I walked to the end of the garden to smell a particular rose. That counted as my morning excursion.

My partner, who has more energy than sense, suggested on day two that we might walk to the nearby beach. I looked at him with the expression I usually reserve for people who suggest jogging on holiday. We compromised by walking to the end of the lane, where we bought tomatoes and mozzarella from a small shop, then returned immediately to our terrace. The tomatoes were still warm from the sun. We ate them with salt and oil and bread that was properly chewy, and I felt genuinely emotional about how little I was achieving.

There is a particular kind of joy in doing very little that I think we have forgotten. Not the scrolling-on-your-phone kind of nothing, which is just distraction wearing a leisure costume. I mean proper, deliberate laziness. Choosing to sit in a garden and notice how the light changes. Letting a whole morning pass while you watch someone else's washing dry on a distant line. I became an expert in the neighbourhood cats, assigning them personalities and backstories. I named the bold tabby who slept on our wall Giuseppe, and spent an unreasonable amount of time considering whether he would prefer the sunny spot or the shady one.

By day four I had stopped wearing a watch. By day five I had genuinely forgotten what day it was, and had to check by looking at the rubbish collection schedule. This felt like an achievement of sorts. The cottage encouraged this amnesia. There was no television to remind you of the world's urgency, and the WiFi was patchy enough that checking emails felt like more effort than it was worth. I let my phone die and did not charge it for two days. Nothing happened. The world continued without my commentary.

On our final morning I sat in that garden with my coffee and watched the sun come up over the hills behind Forio. Giuseppe appeared, judged my company acceptable, and settled on the wall. I thought about our ferry mishap, about my terrible navigation, about all the things I had not done. Pompeii remained unvisited. The famous thermal parks stayed unknown to me. I had walked nowhere of note, seen no sights, collected no experiences to boast about later.

I had never been happier on holiday in my life.