I have never been particularly good at reading maps, which is how I found myself standing in a stranger's front garden in Kropswolde, clutching a suitcase and apologising profusely to a very confused Dutchman who was trying to enjoy his Saturday morning coffee. The sat nav had given up on me somewhere near Hoogezand, and in my wisdom I had decided to navigate by house colour rather than, say, house number. The cottage I was actually booked into was three doors down, mercifully painted a different shade of cream. The owner, a cheerful woman called Marjan, had watched the whole performance from her window and was laughing as she opened the door.

The journey up from the ferry at Hull had been otherwise uneventful, if long. Groningen province unfurls in that particular Dutch way, flat and green and organised, with cycle paths that look freshly painted and canals that seem almost too tidy to be real. By the time I finally arrived at the right address, I was ready to abandon my luggage in the street and simply lie down on the pavement. The cottage, a modest brick affair with a small garden at the back, looked like exactly the sort of place where nothing urgent would ever happen.

Marjan showed me round with the relaxed efficiency of someone who has done this many times before. The kitchen had everything I needed and several things I did not, including a coffee machine with more buttons than my television remote. I nodded along as she explained the boiler, the bins, the proper way to lock the back gate. I retained perhaps forty percent of this information. What stuck with me was the garden, which faced south and caught the afternoon light in a way that seemed almost deliberate, as if someone had planned the whole property around the simple pleasure of sitting still in warm weather.

I had brought three books, which now seems like excessive optimism given my usual holiday reading rate of approximately seven pages before falling asleep. The first morning, I made coffee with the intimidating machine, carried a chair outside, and opened the least challenging novel I owned. Within twenty minutes I was dozing, book collapsed on my chest, vaguely aware of a blackbird making a racket somewhere in the hedge. This set the pattern for the days that followed.

Kropswolde itself is not what anyone would call a destination. It is a village of perhaps a few hundred people, with a church, a handful of shops, and that particular quality of Dutch calm that makes you wonder why you ever thought rushing anywhere was necessary. I walked to the local supermarket for bread and cheese, taking a route that looped pointlessly through a small park because the long way round was prettier. I cycled to Hoogezand one afternoon, along a canal path so straight and level that I barely needed to pedal, and spent an hour in a cafe doing absolutely nothing of consequence. The waitress recognised me when I returned two days later, which made me feel briefly like a local, though my Dutch extends to about six words and three of those are greetings.

The real discovery was the garden bench. It sat in the corner of the cottage garden, slightly weathered, positioned to catch both morning sun and evening shade. I read there, ate there, and on one memorable afternoon attempted to identify cloud formations with the seriousness of someone who had never studied meteorology. I saw shapes that were definitely not officially recognised. A rabbit that was probably just a cumulus. A castle that was almost certainly my imagination.

On my final evening, I walked to the edge of the village where the fields begin, proper Groningen farmland stretching out flat and green to the horizon. A farmer was working late, his tractor crawling along a distant dyke. I stood there for longer than I had intended, watching the light change, thinking about very little. There is something particular about flat landscapes, I decided. They do not demand your attention like mountains or coastlines. They simply exist, quietly, and invite you to do the same.

I packed badly, leaving a sock somewhere mysterious and nearly forgetting my charger. Marjan found me in the garden again, mid-morning, still in my dressing gown with a cup of tea going cold. She did not seem surprised. I apologised for the confusion on arrival, the wrong garden, the disrupted coffee. She waved it away. "You needed the rest," she said, which was both true and slightly embarrassing to have acknowledged so plainly.

The drive back felt longer, though it was not. I stopped at a service station near Meppel and bought a coffee I did not really want, just to prolong the transition. By the time I reached the ferry, the garden bench already felt like something I had imagined, though the sunburn on my knees suggested otherwise. I have the books still, barely progressed. I tell myself I will finish them one day, though I suspect I will not. They have become souvenirs of a different kind, markers of hours spent doing almost nothing at all, in a place that asked nothing more of me than to be there.