I have never been particularly gifted at reading satnavs, which is how I found myself reversing out of a one-way farm track near Oud Gastel with a sheep giving me what I can only describe as a deeply judgmental stare. The journey from the Eurotunnel had been smooth enough - flat Dutch roads, tidy fields, the odd windmill doing its thing - but the final mile defeated me entirely. Three-point turns in a hire car full of suitcases and a bottle of gin I had optimistically packed "for emergencies" is not my idea of a relaxing start.

The mishap turned out to be worth it, though, because arriving at the holiday home felt like stepping into one of those lifestyle photographs where everything is slightly too perfect to be real. The white cottage sat behind a neat garden, and the late afternoon sun was doing that golden thing that makes even a tired traveller feel rather pleased with themselves. I dumped the bags, poured that emergency gin into a mismatched glass I found in a cupboard, and collapsed onto a garden chair with the kind of sigh that suggests I had been carrying the weight of several small nations on my shoulders.

The first thing you notice about North Brabant, once you stop trying to navigate it incorrectly, is the quality of the nothingness. I do not mean this unkindly. The nothingness here is intentional, cultivated, almost architectural in its precision. The garden of this place is designed for sitting in, for watching light move across grass, for noticing that your cup of tea has gone cold because you became distracted by a particularly determined bumblebee. I had brought three books with me, an act of ambition that now seems almost aggressive. I managed four pages of the first one before dozing off in the sunshine, waking with the imprint of wicker on my cheek and a profound sense of achievement.

Oud Gastel itself reveals itself slowly, which suits my pace entirely. A wander to the local shop for bread became a forty-minute expedition because I kept stopping to admire how someone's front garden had been arranged, or to watch a cat watching a pigeon with the fixed concentration of a chess grandmaster. The bakery woman spoke better English than I do, which I found both impressive and faintly embarrassing, and I returned with more pastries than any reasonable person requires, plus some local cheese I selected purely because it had a cheerful cow on the wrapper.

The cottage has a terrace that catches the evening sun, and I have developed an embarrassingly rigid routine of occupying it with whatever I have managed to forage for dinner, plus wine, plus the growing realisation that I am not very good at doing nothing but I am improving rapidly. There is a barbecue I have not yet used, which stares at me with the same judgment as that sheep. Perhaps tomorrow. Perhaps the day after. The books remain largely unread, which bothers me not at all.

I came here with a list, because I am a person who makes lists. It remains in my suitcase, unconsulted. The gentle exploration of a place like this does not require planning, only willingness. A cycle path I found by accident led to a village I cannot now name, where I sat on a bench and watched a canal for twenty minutes, seeing nothing of particular interest and finding it completely absorbing. This is the revelation of North Brabant, I think: that the countryside here does not perform for you, it simply exists, and your job is to exist alongside it for a while, with cold tea and cheese and the distant sound of someone else mowing their lawn.

Tomorrow I intend to do much the same as today, which feels like the most radical intention I have had in years.