I have never been so relieved to see a duck.

The journey up to Lauwerzijl had been one of those classic British-in-a-car situations where you convince yourself that Dutch motorways are basically the same as the M1, just flatter and with better cheese selections. Six hours from the Eurotunnel, three wrong turns around Groningen city centre, and one spectacular argument with a sat nav that insisted on pronouncing every Frisian village name as though it were clearing its throat. By the time I spotted the tiny sign for Lauwerzijl, I was frayed, famished, and fairly certain I had driven past the same windmill three times on purpose just to feel something.

Then came the mishap. The property sat at the end of a narrow lane, all charming brick and proper Dutch neatness, with a small canal running alongside. Lovely, I thought. Idyllic. I reversed the car to let the owner pass, misjudged the width by approximately the length of my own optimism, and deposited the rear passenger side into a drainage ditch with a soggy crunch that still haunts me. The owner, a splendidly unflappable man called Henk, simply nodded, produced a rope from his shed, and had me out within ten minutes. He said nothing. His expression said everything. I have never felt more British in my life.

But then I stepped inside, and something peculiar happened. The stillness got me. Proper stillness, not the anxious kind you get at home when you realise you have forgotten to reply to seventeen emails. This was the real article: thick walls, wooden beams, sunlight falling through windows onto a kitchen table that looked like it had hosted a thousand unhurried breakfasts. I stood there with my ridiculous car and my mud-splattered jeans and felt the particular shame of the over-scheduled modern human confronting actual peace.

I did very little for three days, and it was magnificent. Mornings began with coffee in the small garden, watching the canal move past like it had nowhere particular to be either. I read two entire novels I had been carrying around since March, their pages finally getting the attention they deserved. The local shop in nearby Ezinge supplied bread and cheese and not much else, which was precisely enough. I cycled to the Reitdiep river one afternoon, perhaps three miles, sat on the dyke with my feet dangling, and watched clouds perform slow transformations I had no names for.

The second afternoon, I attempted a longer walk towards Aduarderzijl and turned back after forty minutes because the sunshine through the reed beds was too perfect to leave. This is not a sentence I would have written two weeks prior. I am normally the person who measures walks in steps and calories and whether the podcast queue has been sufficiently diminished. Here, the measure was simply: do I want to stop yet? The answer was usually yes, and the stopping was usually by water, and the water was usually carrying some small boat or swimming duck or nothing at all, and all of it was sufficient.

Henk waved at me once from his bicycle, expression unchanged. I waved back, possibly too enthusiastically, grateful for his rope and his silence and whatever combination of soil and light and northern Dutch sensibility produces people who do not make a fuss about minor disasters.

On the final morning, I packed the car with excessive care, checked the ditch twice, and drove away slowly enough to annoy anyone behind me. I was not changed, exactly. I still argue with sat navs and misjudge distances. But I had spent three days remembering that doing very little is not the same as wasting time, and that sunshine on a canal bank requires no improvement, and that sometimes the best thing a holiday can do is let you stop trying to deserve it.