I should have known the Sat Nav was up to no good the moment it tried to send me through someone's front garden in Steenwijk. Three hours from the Eurotunnel, two wrong turns, and one spectacular argument with a roundabout later, my partner and I finally crawled into Paasloo with the kind of silent tension that only a cramped car and a missed lunch can create.

The cottage sat at the end of a narrow lane, all dark timber and steep roof, looking like something a child might draw if you asked them to sketch a Dutch holiday home. I was still muttering about the Sat Nav when I stepped out onto the gravel and straight into a flowerbed. My left foot disappeared up to the ankle in what I desperately hoped was soil. My partner laughed for the first time since Belgium. I stood there, one leg planted in the earth like a particularly uncoordinated scarecrow, and felt the absurdity of it all wash over me. We were here. The journey was done. And I was already wearing half the garden.

The owner, a cheerful woman called Marjan, appeared from round the side of the house with a trowel in her hand and no apparent surprise at my predicament. She helped me extricate myself, showed us where to park, and left us with a key the size of a small banana and instructions about the coffee machine that I immediately forgot.

Inside, the place smelled of wood polish and something faintly herbal, perhaps the dried lavender hanging in the kitchen. The ceilings sloped dramatically, demanding constant vigilance from anyone over five foot eight. I cracked my head within four minutes, which my partner declared a new personal record. But the living room opened through glass doors onto a small terrace, and beyond that lay a stretch of grass that seemed to go on forever, fringed with trees and the kind of uninterrupted green that makes a person from Surrey feel slightly overwhelmed.

We did almost nothing for the first afternoon. This was the whole point, though it took me embarrassingly long to accept it. I kept suggesting we might drive to Giethoorn, maybe hire a boat, perhaps find a museum. My partner simply moved her deckchair to follow the sun and opened her book. I fidgeted. I checked my phone for signal I did not need. I made tea I did not want. Eventually, defeated by her example and by the warmth pooling on that little terrace, I surrendered.

The next three days followed a rhythm so gentle it barely qualified as a rhythm at all. Morning coffee outside, watching a neighbour's cat make its patrol across the garden boundary. A slow walk to the village shop for bread and cheese, passing the same handful of houses, the same canal, the same patient heron who regarded us with complete indifference. Afternoon reading in the sun, occasionally shifting position when the shade from the trees crept too close. Evening meals assembled from whatever looked promising at the local supermarket, eaten at the wooden table with the doors thrown open to the cooling air.

I had brought three books and finished two, which might be the most productive thing I have achieved in any holiday since childhood. There was a particular spot by the hedge where the grass stayed dry even after dew, and I came to think of it as my office, my kingdom, my entire world reduced to the rectangle of light falling across a paperback page.

On the third evening, walking back from the shop with a bottle of wine clinking against my leg, I stopped on the little bridge over the canal. The water was perfectly still, reflecting trees and sky with such precision it seemed almost rude to disturb it. I thought about all the holidays I had spent rushing between attractions, collecting experiences like stamps, returning home more tired than I left. Here was the opposite: the radical, slightly frightening, ultimately liberating act of simply being present in a quiet place, doing very little, and finding it enough.

The Sat Nav never did learn its lesson. We argued all the way home. But I kept that image of still water, and the memory of warm grass, and the particular quality of light through those glass doors, and I have been trying, with mixed success, to carry something of that laziness back into ordinary life.