I have never been particularly good at reading maps, which is a polite way of admitting that I once spent twenty minutes circling a roundabout near Alkmaar convinced I was making excellent progress. The sat nav had given up on me in that particular tone it reserves for the truly hopeless, and my passenger, a packet of slightly squashed stroopwafels, offered no useful guidance whatsoever. This was my glamorous entrance into Bergen aan Zee, a compact seaside village on the North Holland coast, and I was already sweating through my jumper.

The property I had booked, a modest holiday home tucked among the dunes, revealed itself eventually through a gap in the pine trees like something from a slightly overambitious brochure. I say revealed, but what actually happened was that I reversed into the wrong driveway first, smiled apologetically at a woman hanging out her washing, and then found the correct number three doors down. She waved. I waved back. Neither of us mentioned it.

The first thing that struck me, once I had stopped the engine and located my dignity, was the particular quality of light you get up here. It is not the harsh Mediterranean glare that demands sunglasses and urgent ice cream. This is softer, greyer, more forgiving. The kind of light that makes reading in the garden actually possible without squinting yourself into a headache. I had packed three novels with the optimistic intention of finishing at least one, and standing there with my suitcase half-unpacked on the gravel, I suddenly felt very serious about this commitment.

The house itself had that satisfying Dutch practicality about it. Nothing fussy, everything where you would expect it to be, with windows that opened properly and a small terrace facing south-west where the afternoon sun pooled like something you could almost bottle. I made tea immediately, because I am British and this is how I process new environments, and I sat outside with my feet up on a chair that creaked reassuringly. A bee investigated my mug. I let it. We were both on holiday.

That first afternoon I did absolutely nothing of any consequence, and it felt like an achievement. I wandered down to the beach, perhaps ten minutes through the dunes on a sandy path that shifted pleasantly underfoot, and I stood there watching the North Sea do its usual grey-green business. A few dog walkers nodded at me. A child was attempting to fly a kite with more enthusiasm than technique. I did not swim. I did not even roll up my trousers. I simply stood there, breathing in that particular coastal smell of salt and seaweed and distant fried food, and felt the particular pleasure of having nowhere to be.

Back at the house, I found a deckchair in the shed and positioned it with the precision of someone settling in for the long haul. The sun moved across the terrace. I moved the chair twice, following it like a lazy sundial. I read perhaps four pages, then dozed, then read another paragraph, then watched a small bird argue with its reflection in the window. This was the rhythm I had come for, though I had not known it until it found me.

By evening I had established my territory. The terrace was mine. The slightly wonky garden table was mine. The spot where the sun lingered longest, where I could sit with a book and a cup of something warm and watch the sky do that slow Dutch fade from blue to grey to a particular soft pink that seems to last for hours, that was mine too. I had not seen a single tourist attraction. I had not checked a single recommendation. I had walked to the beach, walked back, and perfected the art of horizontal contemplation.

Dinner that first night was bread and cheese from the small supermarket in the village, eaten outside as the temperature dropped and I refused to admit I needed a jumper. A neighbour two gardens down was doing much the same, and we raised our glasses to each other across the fence without speaking. It was perfect.

I went to bed early, slightly sun-touched, with sand in my shoes and no intention of shaking it out. The book lay face-down on the bedside table, perhaps a chapter further along than when I had arrived, perhaps not. It hardly mattered. Tomorrow I would do much the same, and the day after, and the day after that, and this realisation, far from boring me, felt like something I had been trying to learn for years without knowing the lesson existed.

Some holidays you return from with stories and photographs and a sense of having seized every moment. This was not that kind of holiday, and I loved it more for the lack.