I have never been so happy to see a wooden gate in my life. Twelve hours after leaving Manchester, two delayed flights, one spectacularly overpriced airport sandwich, and a hire car that smelled faintly of pickled gherkins, I finally crunched up the gravel drive of our Dabrowno cottage in Masuria. The sun was doing that golden evening thing, the lake was winking through the trees, and I was ready to collapse into a deckchair and not move for approximately a fortnight.

The mishap, because there is always a mishap, came about forty minutes earlier. I had been navigating with the confidence of a man who once found his way out of IKEA in under an hour. "Turn left at the big church," I announced, spotting what was definitely a church. It was not. It was a very agricultural building of some sort, and the track I confidently steered us down led to a farmyard where a dog the size of a small horse took professional offence at our presence. I performed what I can only describe as an agricultural twelve-point turn while my partner made that particular face she saves for my very best work. We arrived at the proper turning five minutes later, marked by an actual church, considerably less impressive than my impostor.

But here is the thing about Masuria. It forgives you. The lakes district of northeast Poland does not seem to hold grudges against rubbish navigators. It simply waits, all 2,000-odd lakes of it, for you to slow down and notice.

The cottage itself was one of those satisfying timber numbers with a steep roof and a veranda that practically demanded bare feet and a cold drink. I dumped the bags with the enthusiasm of a man who had packed approximately fourteen books and no actual practical clothing. The gherkin car could keep its smell. We were here.

That first evening, we did almost nothing. This became the theme. We watched the light change over the water, drank some local beer that tasted of actual fields, and I read three pages of a novel before my eyelids staged a successful coup. The next morning I woke to birds making an absolute racket and the sun already warm on the wooden walls. I made terrible coffee and drank it on the veranda in pants and a t-shirt, feeling approximately seventeen years old and properly retired simultaneously.

The days that followed settled into a rhythm so lazy it barely qualified as rhythm. Morning coffee became a two-hour affair. I read in the garden until the sun moved and I had to shift my chair like some particularly indolent sundial. We walked down to the lake, maybe twenty minutes through birch woods, and swam when the mood took us. The water was that surprising freshwater temperature - cold enough to make you gasp, then perfect once you stopped being dramatic about it.

We cycled to the nearest village one afternoon, a gentle pedal along lanes where the biggest traffic hazard was free-range chickens with poor risk assessment skills. Bought bread and cheese from a shop where the woman behind the counter tolerated my pointing and smiling with the patience of a saint. Ate it on a bench by a different lake, because Masuria simply has lakes to spare, like other places have puddles.

I had packed those fourteen books thinking I might get through three. I read six. Something about the light, the quiet, the complete absence of anything that needed doing urgently. My partner painted watercolours badly and happily. We talked, or didn't. Watched herons stand completely still in the reeds, which I found inexplicably hilarious. They looked like they were waiting for a bus that would never come.

On our final evening, I sat on that veranda with the same terrible coffee and watched the same light change. I thought about the farmyard dog, the gherkin car, my hopeless church identification. None of it mattered. Masuria had done what it does - slowed everything until you could see it properly. I had arrived frazzled and slightly lost. I was leaving neither, and it had taken remarkably little actual doing to get there.