The sat nav had been insisting we were three minutes away from our Moryn holiday home for the best part of twenty minutes, which should have been my first clue that the Polish countryside was not going to make this easy. We had already done one full circuit of what I am fairly certain was the same cabbage field, and my partner was doing that very British thing of saying "no, no, it's fine" through gritted teeth. Then the road simply stopped. Not ended in a T-junction or politely petered out. Just stopped, replaced by something between a track and a suggestion. I got out to check if we could make it, stepped directly into a puddle that went over my ankle, and stood there in my one good pair of trainers looking like a man who had made a series of poor life choices.

We did eventually find the place, of course. A charming wooden house tucked among trees near the lake, the sort of spot where you immediately forget the journey and start planning which chair you are going to claim for the week. Mine had already been chosen before the bags were out of the car. A wooden lounger on the terrace, positioned to catch the morning sun and afternoon shade in that perfect ratio that serious idlers spend years refining.

And that was more or less the pattern of things. I had brought three books with the vague intention of getting through at least one, but the truth is that I spent most of my time reading the same paragraph repeatedly while watching dragonflies negotiate the garden. There is a particular pleasure in failing to concentrate properly in beautiful surroundings. It feels earned somehow, as if your brain has decided that the view is more important than narrative structure.

The lake itself demanded only the laziest attention. We would wander down in late morning, by which I mean shuffle in flip-flops with a bag of cherries and no particular plan. The water was that surprising clear green you find in these parts, and cold enough to make proper swimming a brief but invigorating affair. Mostly we stood about at the edge like contented herons, occasionally dipping a toe and declaring it refreshing. A local man in very small swimming trunks powered past doing serious lengths. We admired his commitment without remotely considering joining him.

Moryn itself is not a place that hurries you along. The town has a pleasant promenade where we would stroll of an evening, working up an appetite for pierogi that we absolutely did not need after a day of doing nothing whatsoever. There is a marina with boats that look as though they have been there since before I was born, and a church tower visible from most places that serves as a useful landmark for the directionally challenged. We found a cafe that served excellent coffee and slightly alarming portions of cake, and returned to it with the dedication of people who have discovered their spiritual home.

What I had not expected was how quickly the rhythm of very little takes hold. By day three I was genuinely irritated by the concept of an alarm clock, despite not having set one. The body learns. We took to carrying a blanket down to the lakeside and simply lying there, commenting occasionally on the quality of a particular cloud or the progress of a sailing boat that was making even less effort than we were. My partner developed a passionate interest in the family of ducks that patrolled our section of shore. I cannot tell you their names, but I can tell you she had names for them.

There was one afternoon of gentle exploration, if you can call a two-mile wander to the local viewpoint exploration. We took photographs of the lake from above, agreed they did not capture it, and sat on the bench provided for precisely this purpose. A cyclist passed in serious gear, nodded at us with what I chose to interpret as envy, and disappeared into the trees. We remained.

The mishap with the puddle came to feel like the perfect introduction. This was not a holiday of achievement or discovery in any grand sense. It was a week of being present in a small, lovely place, of allowing the sun to set the pace, of finding that doing very little requires no particular skill but does benefit enormously from the right setting. My trainers never fully recovered, which seems a fair price.

On our final morning I woke early and took my coffee to that wooden lounger. The mist was still lifting off the lake, and somewhere a fisherman was making the only purposeful movement I could see. I thought about all the things I had not done, all the sights I had not seen, all the paragraphs I had not finished. Then I put my feet up and watched a squirrel make an absolute hash of getting into the bird feeder. Some things, I decided, are best appreciated slowly.