The thing about driving to a holiday let in rural Sweden is that you convince yourself the sat nav knows what it is doing. Mine most certainly did not. Somewhere between Karlskrona and Listerby, I found myself on a gravel track that grew narrower and more apologetic with every metre, until I was essentially piloting a Volvo through someone's blueberry patch. A very Swedish-looking man emerged from a red wooden house, observed my predicament with the calm of a man who has seen many British drivers befuddled by technology, and silently pointed back the way I had come. I waved cheerfully, as if I had meant to inspect his berries all along.

Twenty minutes later, properly arrived at the Listerby holiday home, I understood why people bother with the journey. The place sat among pine trees with that particular stillness you only get when mobile signal has given up entirely. My first act was to stand on the wooden deck with a cup of tea, watching nothing happen very beautifully. A dragonfly investigated my mug. I decided this was an excellent omen.

The house itself had that practical Scandinavian warmth: pale wood, a kitchen that actually contained useful things rather than the usual holiday-cottage debris of blunt knives and one mysterious fork. I opened every window, which took approximately ninety seconds, then settled into the garden chair with a book I had been meaning to read since approximately 2019. The sun moved across the sky. I turned one page, then another. Somewhere in the distance, a lawnmower started and stopped, started and stopped, as if even the locals could not quite commit to industry in such weather.

I had brought walking shoes with virtuous intentions. They remained by the door for the first two days. Instead I developed a rigorous routine of strolling to the nearby shoreline, which sounds more impressive than it was: perhaps ten minutes through birch woodland that smelled of warm resin, emerging onto smooth rocks where the Baltic lapped with the enthusiasm of a tired golden retriever. I would sit. I would watch sailing boats make their unhurried way toward Karlskrona's archipelago. I would remember that I had forgotten to bring sunglasses and squint romantically at the horizon.

The village of Listerby itself revealed itself slowly, as these places do. A small shop where I bought provisions with the careful optimism of someone whose Swedish extends to "tack" and apologetic smiling. A church with a copper spire that had turned the particular green of old pennies. I walked there one morning, telling myself it was exercise, though I stopped three times to examine wildflowers I could not identify and once to watch a beetle undertake what appeared to be an extremely important journey across the path.

What I had not expected was how aggressively restorative doing almost nothing could feel. At home I would have felt guilty about such indolence. Here, with the sun warming the wooden deck and a borrowed crime novel growing increasingly creased, indolence felt like the entire point. I cooked simple meals from whatever the shop offered: new potatoes, dill, something fish-based that I hoped I had identified correctly. I ate outside until the mosquitoes, democratic in their affections, suggested I move indoors.

By the third day I had achieved that rare state of being genuinely uninterested in what might be happening elsewhere. The world continued, presumably. Emails accumulated, news occurred, people required responses. I observed a woodpecker instead. It seemed like a fair trade.

On my final morning I packed with the reluctance of someone who has remembered how to be still. The gravel track back to proper roads seemed less threatening now, though I still muttered at the sat nav before disabling it entirely. I stopped once more at the shoreline, empty now in early light, and stood with my hands in my pockets like a man who had briefly understood something important about sunlight and pine trees and the particular pleasure of watching a dragonfly consider his tea.