I have always believed that the best holidays begin with a minor disaster, and our trip to Parzensko did not disappoint. We had been driving for the better part of eleven hours, having caught the ferry from Dover to Dunkirk and then pointed the car east with the kind of blind optimism that only a British person in a Ford Fiesta can muster. Somewhere around Berlin, my partner announced she needed the loo with the urgency of a woman who had consumed three coffees and a questionable service station sausage. I pulled into what I thought was a petrol station, only to discover it was a farm shop selling nothing but artisanal gherkins and decorative horseshoes. No toilet. Just gherkins. We drove on in tense silence, me apologising every four minutes, her plotting my demise.

By the time we reached Pomerania, we were frayed. The Polish countryside had given way to pine forests and sudden glimpses of lakes that appeared like silver coins dropped in the green. We found Parzensko down a track that my sat-nav pronounced with the confidence of a man who has never been wrong, which is to say, entirely incorrectly. The place emerged through the trees: a wooden house with a steep roof and a terrace that seemed to sag slightly under the weight of its own contentment.

I stepped out of the car and immediately my left shoe filled with water. I had parked in a puddle the depth of a respectable soup. There I stood, one foot squelching, the other dry, looking up at this absurdly charming house while my partner laughed for the first time since the gherkin incident. It was, I decided, a fitting introduction.

The owner had left the key in a flowerpot, which felt thrillingly illicit, and we stepped inside to that particular hush of a holiday let that has been recently cleaned and patiently waiting. The smell was pine and something faintly of polish, the good kind. The living room had windows that swallowed the garden whole, and beyond it, the shimmer of what I later learned was Lake Parzen. I stood there in my wet sock, suddenly aware that I had not stopped moving in months.

We did very little that first afternoon. This became the pattern. The house had books left by previous guests, a motley collection of Scandinavian crime novels and a German guide to bird identification. I read neither with any real attention, preferring to let the pages turn themselves while I sat on the terrace with a beer that cost less than a London bus fare. The sun moved slowly across the sky, and I moved with it, shifting my chair like a lazy sundial.

The days that followed dissolved into a rhythm so gentle it barely qualified as rhythm at all. Morning coffee on the terrace, watching a neighbour's cat make its rounds with the entitlement of a minor royal. A walk to the lake, perhaps, though never far. The water was cold enough to remind you that you were alive, and warm enough that you did not immediately wish you were not. We found a spot under birch trees where the light came through in coins, and there we would lie with our books, reading the same paragraphs repeatedly because the sunshine had made us stupid and content.

There was a small shop in the village, ten minutes by bicycle, which sold bread that was still warm at eight in the morning and cheese that tasted of whatever the cows had been dreaming. I became embarrassingly fond of the woman who ran it, mainly because she tolerated my Polish, which consists of six words deployed with wild inaccuracy. She taught me the correct pronunciation of Parzensko, which I had been mangling for days, and I felt the small pride of a child receiving a sticker.

We did not visit Gdansk, though we talked about it. We did not drive to the coast, though we looked at photographs online and agreed it looked lovely. The furthest we ventured was a neighbouring village where someone had built a miniature railway in their garden, open on Sunday afternoons to anyone who happened by. We happened by, and rode it, two adults in a tiny carriage pulled by a petrol engine, grinning like fools.

What I remember most is the afternoon light on the wooden walls of the house, the way it turned everything golden and slow. I remember finishing no books, learning nothing of significance, and returning home with a mind that felt pleasantly empty, like a room recently cleared of clutter. The wet shoe dried on the terrace and became a running joke, a monument to my own small foolishness.

We left on a morning when mist hung over the lake, and I stood for a moment with my coffee, watching it burn off. My partner asked what I was thinking, and I said nothing, because I was not thinking anything at all, and that was the whole point.