I have never been particularly gifted at reading maps, which is how I found myself reversing down a farm track near Luce convinced I was about to become a very minor local news story. The sat nav had given up on me somewhere past Celje, and my phone was threatening to die with that smug little red battery icon. I had been aiming for a charming holiday home in Savinjska. I had found a field of extremely judgmental goats.

Twenty minutes of increasingly sweaty negotiation with a kindly farmer later, I was back on tarmac and finally spotted the wooden sign for the property. The relief was biblical.

The house sat tucked into a gentle slope with the Savinja River glinting somewhere below through the trees. I am not too proud to admit that I stood in the gravel driveway for a solid minute just breathing. The drive from Ljubljana had been all motorways and stress, but this felt like stepping through a door into someone else's calmer life. The air smelled of pine and cut grass and something faintly herbal that I later learned was probably wild thyme from the meadow behind.

My host had left the key in the traditional manner, which is to say hidden in a location so obvious that I spent ten minutes searching everywhere else first. The door opened with that satisfying wooden thunk you only get in proper old buildings, and I stepped into coolness and the smell of beeswax. The interior was simple in the best way: wooden beams, a kitchen that looked like it had actually cooked things, and windows that framed the greenery outside like paintings someone had hung specially for me.

I had brought three books with the ambitious intention of reading them all. This was, I quickly realised, absurd optimism. I unpacked with the sluggishness of someone who had already decided that urgency was a concept for other people. My case sat half-open on the bedroom floor for two days. I kept meaning to finish. I never did.

That first afternoon, I did nothing more strenuous than carry a chair into the garden and sit in it. The sun moved across the sky. Birds made their various announcements. Somewhere in the valley, a dog barked once and thought better of it. I read perhaps four pages of my novel, then put it down to watch a butterfly make increasingly poor decisions around a lavender bush. Time behaved differently here. It pooled rather than flowed.

I had intended to be energetic. I had printed walking routes. I had read about local attractions with the earnestness of someone preparing a school project. But the garden held me with what I can only describe as gentle gravitational force. The wooden table under the pergola became my headquarters. Morning coffee stretched into mid-morning coffee. Lunch happened when I remembered it. Afternoon merged into evening with the subtlety of a accomplished con artist.

On the second day, I managed a stroll to the village. Luce itself is small in that particular Slovenian way where small does not mean lacking. There was a shop where I bought bread and cheese and had a conversation in approximately six shared words of mutual language. There was a church with a roof that had seen things. There was a bench where I sat for another unreasonable length of time watching elderly men play a card game I did not understand and suspected they might not fully either.

The river, when I finally reached it on day three, was the colour of green glass in old bottles. I paddled. I am forty-two years old and I paddled in a river like a child on a half-term break, and I felt no shame whatsoever. The water was cold enough to make me gasp, which seemed like the appropriate response.

Evenings became a ritual of diminishing ambition. The first night I cooked properly, making something with the local cheese that felt worthy of documentation. The second night I ate bread and tomatoes in the garden until it was too dark to see my plate. The third night I had ice cream for dinner and refused to feel guilty about it. The books sat in a reproachful stack. I read the same page repeatedly. It did not matter.

What I am trying to say, I suppose, is that I came to Savinjska with plans and left them at the door like muddy boots. The holiday home in Luce gave me something I had not known I needed: permission to be unproductive in beautiful surroundings. The world did not end because I walked slowly. Nothing collapsed because I chose sitting over sightseeing. The sun rose and set regardless, and I was there to notice it, which suddenly seemed like enough.

On my final morning, I packed properly for the first time. The case closed with a decisive zip. I stood in the garden with my coffee and tried to fix the feeling in my memory: the particular quality of light through the leaves, the distant sound of the river, the absolute stillness of being exactly where I was. I failed, of course. You cannot keep these things. But you can try to find your way back to them, though perhaps next time I will check the map more carefully before I set off.