I have never been so grateful to see a wooden veranda in all my life. Six hours, two delayed trains, and one spectacularly ill-advised decision to trust my phone's GPS over an actual map had brought me to Soelvesborg in Blekinge, and by that point I would have hugged a lamp post if it had promised me a cup of tea.

The mishap, because there is always one with me, came about forty minutes outside the town. I had been patting myself on the back for navigating Copenhagen to Karlskrona with barely a wrong turn. Then, in a moment of pure overconfidence, I decided the scenic route sounded romantic. The scenic route, as it turned out, was a gravel track through pine forest that grew progressively narrower until I found myself performing a seventeen-point turn in front of a very unimpressed moose. I sat there for a good five minutes, hands still glued to the wheel, wondering if Swedish breakdown services would accept "existential crisis with ungulate witness" as a valid call-out reason. The moose left first. I took this as a sign to retreat to civilisation.

When I finally pulled up to the property, the late afternoon sun was doing that magical Scandinavian thing where everything turns honey-coloured and slightly unreal. The house sat among birch trees with their white bark peeling like old wallpaper, and beyond them I could glimpse the archipelago water glinting through the trunks. My shoulders dropped about three inches without me asking them to.

The key was exactly where promised, which already felt like a minor miracle given my track record. I fumbled with the lock, still slightly vibrating from the moose encounter, and stepped straight into the smell of pine and something else I could not place. Clean air, perhaps. The kind that makes you aware of how much your London lungs have been putting up with.

The living room was all light wood and enormous windows, and I did that thing where you stand in the middle of the floor turning slowly like a malfunctioning robot, trying to take everything in at once. A wood-burning stove sat in the corner looking terribly competent and Scandinavian. I immediately pictured myself beside it with a book I would pretend to read while actually dozing, and felt a small flutter of something dangerously close to contentment.

I dumped my bags with the grace of a sack of potatoes and made straight for the veranda, because those water glimpses had been teasing me. The deck ran along two sides of the house, furnished with weathered wooden chairs that had clearly seen many summers of reasonable wine consumption and slightly unreasonable mosquito swatting. I lowered myself into one with the caution of a pensioner and it creaked a warning but held. The view was proper archipelago stuff: rocky outcrops, a few distant sails, water so calm it looked almost staged. Somewhere across the channel I could see the faint outline of what I later learned was one of the smaller islands, though at that moment it could have been Atlantis for all I cared.

I stayed there until the light started to fade and the midges began their evening commute. My phone buzzed with a message from my sister asking if I had arrived safely. I sent her a photograph of the view and a lie about the journey being uneventful. Some things, like being out-stared by a moose, are better shared in person with a drink in hand.

That first evening, I did not do much of anything. I found the kitchen properly stocked with actual sharp knives, which felt like an unexpected luxury, and made myself the kind of simple supper that tastes better when you are slightly tired and very pleased with yourself. I kept wandering back to the windows to check the view had not disappeared. It had not.

By the time I crawled into bed, the silence had become almost physical, a weightless thing pressing gently against the windows. I lay there listening to nothing in particular and thought about how I had nearly let my own ridiculousness derail this. The wrong turn, the gravel track, the staring contest with local wildlife. Without them, I realised, I would not have arrived quite so ready to be impressed, quite so willing to slow down and let a place work its quiet magic.

The morning would bring proper exploration, perhaps a walk down to the nearest bathing spot, certainly more of that veranda sitting. But for now, eyelids heavy and limbs pleasantly slack, I let myself drift off with the certain knowledge that I had absolutely no idea what time it was back home, and even less interest in finding out.