I have never been so grateful for a sat nav giving up on me as I was on the way to our little place in Erm. There we were, trundling through Drenthe in a hire car that smelled faintly of air freshener and regret, when the robotic voice announced we had reached our destination. We had not. We were in a field. A very nice field, admittedly, with some excellent cows who looked deeply unimpressed by our arrival, but a field nonetheless. My partner Dave shot me one of those looks that said this was somehow my fault, despite him being the one holding the phone. Twenty minutes of increasingly tense three-point turns later, we found the actual property tucked down a proper little lane, and I have rarely felt such relief at the sight of a holiday cottage.

The thing about Erm is that you cannot really rush it. The village does not do rushing. It does trees, and space, and that particular quality of silence that makes you realise how much noise you normally put up with. Our cottage had one of those gardens where the grass has clearly never heard of a neat stripe pattern and instead just does whatever it fancies, which I found rather inspiring. Within approximately four minutes of dumping our bags, I was horizontal on a weathered wooden lounger with a book I had been meaning to read for eighteen months, and Dave was already snoring in a way that suggested he had found his spiritual home.

I had grand plans for our first morning. I really did. I was going to be one of those people who rises with the sun and does something wholesome before breakfast. Instead I woke at half nine, slightly confused about which direction the kitchen was in, and spent a solid hour just wandering the garden with a cup of tea watching a spider rebuild its web. That was the whole activity. No podcast, no scrolling, just me and this remarkably determined spider going about our respective business in the dew. I cannot remember the last time I gave a spider my full attention. Probably never. It felt like a minor personal breakthrough, though I would not go so far as to call it enlightenment.

The sunshine in Drenthe has a particular thickness to it, especially in late afternoon when it filters through the oak trees and turns everything slightly golden. We spent most of that first day doing what I can only describe as aggressive nothing. Reading three pages, dozing, reading the same three pages again. Walking to the village shop for bread and cheese, which took twenty minutes because we kept stopping to admire someone's particularly excellent hedge. The bread was still warm, which felt like a small miracle, and we ate it in the garden with our feet in the grass like teenagers who had nowhere particular to be.

By evening I had achieved that rare state where your thoughts actually slow down enough to notice them. I sat on the little patio as the light faded and realised I had not once worried about work, or emails, or whether I should be doing something more productive with my time. The cottage had no particular view to speak of, just more trees and sky and the occasional distant sound of a bicycle, and somehow that was exactly enough. More than enough, really.

I used to think proper holidays needed drama, or at least a decent itinerary. Erm has rather cured me of that. Sometimes the best thing you can do is arrive slightly lost, sit down in some decent sunshine, and let the day unfold at the pace it prefers. The spider certainly had the right idea.