I had been driving for what felt like fourteen hours but was probably closer to four when I realised, with that particular sinking feeling that only comes from being a complete clot, that I had left my suitcase on the kitchen floor in Surrey. There it sat, packed with all my sensible layers and my one decent pair of shoes, while I rolled into Noordwijk with nothing but a half-empty bag of wine gums and a sat nav that had developed a concerning attitude problem.

Still, the Dutch have a word for this sort of thing, or at least I like to imagine they do. Probably something that sounds like a cough but means "the art of carrying on regardless." I carried on regardless, pulling up to the holiday home with the wine gums clutched like a talisman against my own stupidity.

The property sat tucked along one of those quiet residential lanes that Noordwijk does so well, all neat gardens and the faint promise of the sea somewhere just beyond the rooftops. My first impression, once I had stopped muttering at myself, was of light. Great sheets of the stuff pouring through windows that seemed designed specifically to make a person feel they had arrived somewhere that understood the value of doing absolutely nothing in particular.

I stepped inside and immediately abandoned any plan that resembled a plan. The sitting room wrapped itself around me with that particular Scandinavian-Dutch sensibility, all clean lines and impossible comfort, as if someone had spent considerable energy ensuring I would never want to stand up again. I tested this theory extensively over the following days.

The kitchen, when I eventually found it, revealed a previous occupant had left behind a jar of stroopwafels. I ate three in what I can only describe as a fugue state, standing at the counter in my travel-wrinkled clothes, watching a neighbour water their window boxes with the focused precision of someone performing heart surgery. The Dutch do not merely tend gardens. They negotiate with them.

That first afternoon, I walked to the beach in the clothes I had travelled in, which turned out to be a t-shirt, jeans, and one of those expressions people wear when they are trying very hard to look like they meant to do everything exactly this way. Noordwijk's beach stretched before me like a postcard that had given up on being impressive and simply settled into being perfect. The light again, that particular coastal Dutch quality where everything seems slightly overexposed and impossibly clear.

I found a strandpavilion, ordered something involving coffee and considerable cream, and sat with my feet in the sand reading a paperback I had purchased at the airport in a panic. It was terrible. I loved it. I read the same paragraph four times because the sun had warmed my shoulders into a state of complete operational failure, and I could not be bothered to concentrate.

The days that followed settled into a rhythm so gentle it barely qualified as rhythm at all. Morning coffee in the small garden, watching the neighbourhood perform its quiet rituals. A slow walk to the baker for bread that tasted of actual effort. Afternoons on the beach with my terrible book, occasionally dipping into the North Sea with the theatrical gasping that the British bring to any water temperature below tropical. Evenings cooking simple things in that efficient kitchen, eating on the terrace as the light finally, reluctantly, drained from the sky.

I never did replace my suitcase. I bought a jumper from a charity shop in the village centre, borrowed the property's collection of beach towels, and discovered that doing very little requires surprisingly few possessions. The wine gums lasted approximately two days. I did not replace those either.

There was a moment, perhaps on the fourth day, when I caught myself staring at a cloud for what must have been twenty minutes. No thoughts. No productive mental activity whatsoever. Just the cloud, doing its cloud business, and me doing mine, which appeared to be nothing at all. I felt a brief flicker of guilt, that peculiar British compulsion to justify existence through busyness, and then I let it go. The cloud was not busy. The cloud was simply being a cloud. I could, for a week at least, simply be a person in Noordwijk.

I walked to the lighthouse one morning, a gentle stroll through the dunes that took perhaps forty minutes each way. I counted this as vigorous exercise and rewarded myself with an hour of horizontal reading. I cycled to the village centre another day, wobbling slightly on borrowed bikes along flat paths that made cycling feel less like sport and more like assisted gliding. I bought cheese. I ate the cheese. This was the extent of my ambition.

The holiday home itself encouraged this approach, I think. It did not demand attention or activity. It simply provided space and light and the particular comfort of a place that knows exactly what it is. I spent one entire afternoon on the sofa, curtains half-drawn against the brightest hours, dozing through a radio programme I could not understand and had no desire to translate. The language barrier became a feature rather than an obstacle. Everything softened into pleasant background noise.

My final morning, I packed my airport jumper and my terrible book and my remaining dignity, and I walked to the beach one last time. The same strandpavilion, the same over-creamed coffee, the same impossible light. I watched a dog chase a ball with the committed enthusiasm I had brought to my own doing of nothing, and I thought about how rarely I allowed myself this particular version of happiness. Not the happiness of achievement or acquisition or even proper rest, but the happiness of simply existing in a pleasant place with no particular direction.

I drove home with the sat nav still sulking, my suitcase presumably still waiting in Surrey, and a pocket full of sand that would turn up in my washing machine for weeks. I did not mind. Some things, I had learned, are worth carrying with you.