I have never been so relieved to see a wooden veranda in my life. After a twelve-hour slog from Manchester involving two flights, a train that smelled of pickled herring, and a hire car with a sat nav that insisted on pronouncing every Swedish place name as if it were having a small stroke, I finally pulled up at the little red cottage outside Emmaboda. That is when I discovered I had left my suitcase on the train.

Not my hand luggage. Not a coat. My entire suitcase, sitting happily on a luggage rack somewhere between Copenhagen and Karlskrona, probably making friends with a commuter's bicycle. I stood in the gravel driveway, clutching a carrier bag of duty-free biscuits and my own mortification, wondering how I had managed to travel halfway across Europe with such spectacular incompetence. The cottage looked back at me with its white-framed windows, utterly unbothered. I took a breath. The air smelled of pine and something faintly floral. A woodpecker was having a go at a birch tree. It was all so peacefully Swedish that my panic felt almost rude.

The key was in the lockbox, exactly where the instructions said. I let myself in, still in yesterday's clothes, and found the place immediately forgiving. Light poured through the kitchen windows onto a scrubbed wooden table. There was a proper coffee maker, the sort that burbles to itself on the hob. Someone, presumably a previous guest with more foresight than me, had left behind a packet of filter coffee and a half-empty tin of cinnamon biscuits. I made a pot, wrapped myself in a blanket I found on the sofa, and sat on that veranda with my terrible instant coffee in a chipped mug, watching nothing much happen in the surrounding forest. It was glorious.

The next morning, after a deeply unsatisfying phone call with Swedish rail that involved a lot of patient English and my own increasingly desperate hand gestures despite being on the telephone, I accepted my situation. I had the clothes on my back, a toothbrush from the airport, and a cottage full of someone else's abandoned holiday reading. I found a dog-eared crime novel in Swedish, which I could not read, and a battered copy of a Dick Francis mystery, which I absolutely could. I took it down to the small rocky outcrop near the property's edge, where the forest thinned enough to let the sun through properly for a few hours each afternoon.

That became my routine. Not the routine I had planned, with day trips and ambitious walks and perhaps some kayaking if I was feeling energetic. Instead: slow mornings with excessive coffee, the veranda, the novel, the shifting patches of sunlight moving across the mossy ground. When I needed to stretch, I pottered down to the lake that sits maybe ten minutes' gentle stroll from the cottage. The water was still cold enough to make wading brief and hilarious, but I would perch on a flat rock with my feet in, watching dragonflies argue with each other. Once, a family of ducks passed by in strict formation, and I felt genuinely honoured by their presence.

I did venture to the little local shop in Emmaboda, a practical pilgrimage for toothpaste and a cheap pair of trousers. The woman at the till spoke better English than my dentist and did not even flinch at my dishevelled appearance. I bought some local cheese, dense and slightly sharp, and ate it with crispbread on the veranda for every lunch for four days. It never got boring. The simplicity was the point.

My suitcase arrived on the third day, deposited by a cheerful man in a van who seemed faintly disappointed I had not made more of a fuss. By then, I had almost stopped wanting it. There was something quietly radical about being so unburdened, about having nothing to do but follow the sun around the property like a lazy cat, about reading the same thriller twice because I had nothing else and discovering it held up better than expected.

I have been on holidays where I did everything right. This was not one of them. And I think it might have been my favourite.