I have never been one to trust my phone's sat nav unconditionally, and yet there I was, somewhere between Slupsk and the coast, following a cheerful voice down a road that grew progressively narrower until I found myself face to face with a very unimpressed farmer and his potato field. The farmer, bless him, just pointed wordlessly back the way I had come. Three-point turn of shame completed, I finally spotted the actual turning for Rowy, a little seaside village on Poland's Baltic coast where I had booked a wooden holiday cottage for the week.

It was late September when I arrived, that peculiar window where summer has definitely packed its bags but winter has not yet worked up the courage to knock. The place I had booked was one of those traditional Polish wooden houses, painted a cheerful yellow with white trim, the sort that clusters in little holiday settlements all along this stretch of coast. I had chosen September deliberately, seduced by cheaper rates and the promise of quiet, though standing there with my suitcase as the wind whipped straight off the sea, I did wonder if I had slightly overestimated my fondness for solitude.

The cottage was simple inside, all pine panelling and practical furniture, with a small kitchen that smelled faintly of the previous occupant's fried fish. I opened the windows to air the place out and immediately closed them again. The Baltic in late September does not do gentle breezes. It does proper, shoulder-hunching, hair-tangling wind that makes you reconsider every life choice that brought you to this particular moment. I put the kettle on and stood at the window watching the garden, where a single stubborn rose clung to a trellis, petals rattling like a flag of surrender.

What struck me most that first afternoon was how completely the season had emptied the place. Rowy in summer, I gather, is all ice cream queues and children shrieking in the surf. My September Rowy was shuttered beach huts and a single brave dog walker on the sand. The little shops near the beach were closed up, their awnings furled tight against the weather. I walked down to the shore anyway, because one must, and found the beach vast and grey and entirely mine. The sea was that particular Baltic colour, not blue exactly, more like someone had mixed all their watercolours together in a fit of pessimism. I loved it immediately, though my ears were ringing with cold after ten minutes.

That evening, back in the cottage with the heating finally kicking in, I cooked a simple supper and ate it with the radio on for company. Polish pop music, half familiar from childhood holidays with my grandmother, filled the little rooms. I caught myself talking aloud to the empty house, commenting on the cooking as if hosting an invisible audience. This is what off-season solitude does to you, I thought, and rather than feeling pathetic, I felt oddly liberated. There is something about being slightly uncomfortable, slightly too cold, slightly ridiculous in a potato field, that strips away the performative bits of a holiday and leaves you with whatever you actually are.

The wind rattled the windows all night, and I slept better than I had in months.