I'd never driven a left-hand-drive car onto a ferry before, so naturally I spent the entire crossing from Hull worrying about which side of the road I'd instinctively choose when we hit Dutch tarmac. Turns out I needn't have bothered. The real disaster struck five minutes from our holiday home in Workum, when I confidently followed the sat nav down what I can only describe as a bike path with delusions of grandeur. There was water on one side, a very unimpressed cyclist on the other, and my partner making that particular face she saves for my very finest moments. Reversing two hundred metres while she laughed and filmed the whole thing for posterity was not how I'd imagined our arrival in Friesland.

But then we turned onto the proper road, and there it was: a proper Frisian house with that distinctive stepped gable, sitting quietly beside one of Workum's canals. The owners had left the key in a lockbox with a note wishing us "hA¡nze wAaze" - good living, apparently, though I initially thought it might be instructions for the boiler. Stepping inside, the place had that particular stillness of a house that's been waiting. Wooden floors that creaked in friendly greeting. Light pouring through windows that looked out onto nothing more dramatic than a neighbour's garden and a very old tree. I stood there with our bags still in the car and felt something in my shoulders actually drop.

The garden became our headquarters for the week. I'd brought three books and finished none of them, which I consider a mark of supreme success. There is an art to reading in sunshine that I have only recently begun to appreciate: the paragraph, the glance up at clouds moving impossibly slowly, the return to the page having forgotten entirely who was speaking. My partner developed a serious relationship with a particular wooden lounger, emerging only for coffee or to announce that she'd seen another heron. I didn't see any herons myself, but I believed her absolutely.

Workum itself rewards the unambitious wanderer. We walked to the Jopie Huisman Museum one morning, dedicated to a local painter who celebrated ordinary Frisian life with almost embarrassing sincerity. The rest of the day we spent achieving nothing whatsoever, which felt like the appropriate response. The town has eleven churches for its modest population, or so a man in the bakery told me while I struggled to pronounce "sA»kerbole" correctly. I stopped trying after the third attempt and simply pointed, which he accepted with the resigned kindness of someone who has watched many British people point at bread.

Some days we cycled to the IJsselmeer, that enormous lake which pretends to be a sea. The beach at Workum is proper sand, unexpectedly, and we would take sandwiches and watch the sailboats performing their slow, complicated choreography. I attempted to swim once, emerging after approximately ninety seconds with the dignified retreat of someone who has misjudged Dutch summer water temperatures. My partner did not swim at all, but made excellent supportive noises from her towel.

The thing about a week of deliberate laziness is how strangely confronting it becomes. I am not good at stillness by nature. I like lists and purposes and the satisfaction of arrival. But Friesland in sunshine asks something different of you. It offers flat horizons and endless sky and the gentle insistence that nothing needs doing right now, perhaps not ever. By Thursday I found myself genuinely content to sit with an unread book on my lap, watching a bee negotiate a flower for what felt like half an hour. I cannot tell you what kind of bee it was. I did not look it up. This felt like progress of a sort I had not previously valued.

On our final morning, I made coffee and carried both mugs into the garden. The same tree, the same light, the same particular quality of quiet. My partner was already awake, already horizontal, already watching something I couldn't see. I handed her the coffee and sat down beside her, and we stayed there until it was absolutely necessary to pack the car and navigate, very carefully, back toward the ferry.