I should have known the sat nav was up to no good when it tried to send me through someone's front garden in the middle of Voorthuizen. There I was, crawling along in my slightly-too-big hire car, convinced I was about to become the first tourist in history to be chased out of Gelderland by an angry Dutchman with a trowel. Turns out the cottage was three minutes further on, down a perfectly normal lane, and I'd simply confused "rustic shortcut" with "actual private driveway." The owner, a cheerful chap called Henk, found this hilarious. I found it less hilarious after four hours of driving from Schiphol, but we got there in the end.

The cottage itself was one of those proper Nova-sol finds - a converted farmhouse affair with beams that have definitely seen things and a garden that smelled of cut grass and something herby I couldn't identify. I dumped my bags, made the obligatory cup of tea with the funny continental kettle, and promptly did absolutely nothing for the remainder of the afternoon. This was, I quickly decided, the entire point of being here.

Voorthuizen sits in that lovely bit of Gelderland where the Veluwe starts getting serious about being heathland, and the cottage made the most of it. I spent my first morning in the garden with a book I kept not reading, watching a bee the size of a small aircraft investigate the lavender. Every so often I'd remember I was meant to be on holiday and would take a deliberate sip of coffee, as if ticking off an achievement. The coffee went cold. I didn't mind.

The village itself is barely a stroll away, though "stroll" implies more purpose than I actually managed. I wandered down for bread on day two, got distracted by a canal, and sat on a bench for forty minutes watching a moorhen argue with its own reflection. The bread could wait. Everything could wait. This was the revelation of the place - that doing very little in decent weather is not merely acceptable but actively virtuous, like some kind of mindfulness exercise without the app.

I did make it to the local shop eventually, where I bought cheese that I ate in thick slices with no crackers, standing in the kitchen doorway like a peasant king. The Veluwe proper beckoned from various directions, and I made vague plans about cycling or proper walking, but the garden kept winning. There was a particular patch of sunlight that moved across the lawn like a slow clock, and I found myself following it with my chair, a human sundial of indolence.

On day four I achieved my greatest triumph: I read an entire chapter without falling asleep or checking my phone. The book was mediocre. The triumph was genuine. Henk had mentioned something about the nearby heathlands being spectacular, and I'm sure they are. I'll find out next time, perhaps. Or perhaps not.

The mishap with the sat nav became my running joke with myself, a little reminder that the journey doesn't need to be efficient to be worthwhile. I'd come to Gelderland with a mental list, as one does, and left with something better - a suntan in the shape of my t-shirt and the certain knowledge that a week of gentle nothingness is not wasted time but recovered time, time you didn't know you'd lost until you stopped looking for it.

On my last morning I sat in that moving patch of sunlight with my final cup of tea, watching the same bee or perhaps its cousin, and felt no urge whatsoever to pack with any urgency. The sat nav would get me lost again, no doubt. I was rather counting on it.