I have never been so relieved to see a wooden gate in my life. After six hours of driving from Poznan airport, during which I managed to get us lost twice in what I can only describe as "very flat nowhere," we finally crunched up the gravel drive to our boruja in Wielkopolska. The sat nav had given up somewhere near a field of sugar beet and started suggesting we drive into a drainage ditch. I ignored it. My partner, Mark, suggested perhaps I should not have ignored it. This was roughly the point where I discovered I had been holding the printed directions upside down since the service station outside Gniezno. I am forty-two years old and apparently still capable of such achievements.

The boruja itself appeared through a clutch of birch trees like something from a storybook, if storybooks featured slightly wonky timber holiday homes with excellent decking. Ours had a little porch stacked with firewood and a hammock strung between two apple trees that immediately called out to me with the promise of absolutely nothing productive whatsoever. The key was in the lock box exactly where the instructions said, which felt like a small miracle given my navigational performance.

Inside smelled of pine and clean linen. The kitchen was compact in that way that makes you realise you do not need seventeen different utensils to make a cup of tea. Mark immediately opened every cupboard to assess our coffee situation. I opened the doors to the little terrace and stood there doing what I can only describe as "aggressive relaxing." The garden rolled away into meadow, then more meadow, then some extremely committed meadow beyond that. A red squirrel shot across the grass, paused to judge me, and vanished into the hedgerow. I took this as approval.

We had brought three novels between us, which now seems like a comical underestimate. By late afternoon I had already claimed the hammock and was deep into a paperback, occasionally waving away a bee who seemed personally offended by my presence. Mark dozed on the terrace with his hat over his face. The sun moved slowly across the sky in that particularly Polish summer way, all golden and unhurried, and we moved with it. Shifted the chairs. Moved to the shade. Moved back to the sun. It was glorious and pointless and exactly what we needed.

The village of Boruja itself, when we finally wandered down the lane for supplies, turned out to be a handful of houses, a church with a pleasingly crooked spire, and a shop where I bought bread and some local cheese using a combination of broken Polish and enthusiastic pointing. The woman behind the counter seemed used to this. I came away with something called twarog that turned out to be perfect with tomatoes from the little vegetable patch behind our boruja. We ate dinner on the terrace watching the light change over the fields, and I felt something in my shoulders actually give up and loosen for the first time in months.

That evening I sat with my feet in the grass, wine in hand, watching swallows dart above the meadow. Mark was attempting to identify a bird from its song using an app that kept suggesting "common chaffinch" for everything from a blackbird to what was probably a tractor in the distance. I did not care. The hammock awaited. The book awaited. The sun would rise tomorrow on another day of determined, deliberate, beautiful idleness, and I planned to meet it with absolutely no ambition whatsoever.