I have never been so happy to see a place with no mobile signal as I was when we finally rolled up to our Tzummarum cottage in Friesland. The journey from Harwich had been smooth enough, or so we thought, right up until the moment I confidently marched into a petrol station just past Leeuwarden and asked, in my finest holiday Dutch, for "twee honderd euro of benzine" instead of "liter." The poor lad behind the counter looked at me like I'd offered to buy his firstborn child. My partner, who had been dozing in the car, woke up to me shuffling back out with a receipt for two euros of fuel and a face the colour of beetroot. We spent the next twenty minutes at the pump round the corner, giggling like teenagers while I tried to explain to another utterly baffled attendant what had happened.

By the time we reached Tzummarum, I was ready to hide from the world for a week. And hide we did, in the most glorious fashion imaginable.

The cottage itself sat tucked along a quiet lane, all traditional Friesian brick and a garden that seemed to have been arranged by someone who understood that holidays are for doing absolutely nothing productive. We dumped our bags, made a pot of tea that tasted better than any tea has a right to, and simply stood in the garden listening to nothing much at all. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked. A bicycle whirred past. That was the extent of the chaos.

I had packed three books, which I considered ambitious. I read two and a half of them, mostly while sprawled in a deckchair that had clearly seen better decades but still held together through sheer Dutch engineering stubbornness. The sun, when it appeared, which was far more often than my pessimistic British soul had prepared for, turned the garden into something approaching paradise. I would wake, make coffee, wander outside in my socks, and simply exist. No itinerary. No must-see attractions. No frantic ticking of boxes.

We did venture out, of course, but never far and never with any particular urgency. The village of Tzummarum itself offered little more than a church, a few houses, and a profound sense that nobody here was in any rush whatsoever. We cycled to Franeker one afternoon, pottered about the canal, ate cheese that tasted of actual grass, and cycled back with the wind against us the whole way. I have never felt so smugly exhausted by such minimal effort.

The nearby coast at the Wadden Sea provided another afternoon of profound laziness. We walked along the dyke, watched the tide doing its eternal business, and talked about nothing in particular. My partner observed that I had become almost unrecognisably relaxed, and I realised they were right. Somewhere between the book-reading and the cheese-eating and the wind-burnished cycling, I had shed whatever anxious energy I normally carried around like a second rucksack.

On our final morning, I sat in that decrepit deckchair with my half-finished third book and watched a blackbird methodically work its way through a flowerbed. I thought about my petrol station humiliation, about all the holidays where I had raced from sight to sight, about how thoroughly I had misunderstood what rest could look like. The blackbird found a worm. I found something I had not known I was missing.

We left the keys on the table, loaded the car with our three-quarters-empty suitcases, and drove away slowly, deliberately, already planning when we might return to do absolutely nothing all over again.