The sat nav gave up on us somewhere past Kalmar, which was probably for the best since I'd been arguing with it for the last forty minutes. "Turn around where possible," it kept saying, as if we were deliberately defying it rather than simply following a road that had apparently not existed when the maps were drawn. My other half, who had claimed to be "brilliant with directions," was squinting at a phone with 3% battery and a PDF of instructions that refused to zoom properly. We found Lottorp eventually, mostly by following a tractor and hoping for the best.

The mishap came when we finally crunched up the gravel drive. I was so relieved to see the little wooden house with its red trim that I flung open the car door with theatrical abandon, straight into a low stone wall. The door bounced back, I yelped, and a packet of digestive biscuits I'd been clutching for three hours exploded across the driveway. A neighbour's cat appeared from nowhere and sat in judgment as I crawled about retrieving them. Welcome to Oland, I thought. Welcome indeed.

But then we stepped inside, and something shifted. The place smelled of pine and old books and something faintly herby that I later realised was the dried lavender hanging in the kitchen. Big windows let the afternoon light pour across wooden floors that creaked in all the right places. I stood there with a bruised elbow and a handful of dusty biscuits and felt the particular tension of motorway driving begin to leak out of me. The instructions had mentioned a "well-equipped kitchen," which turned out to be accurate if you enjoy the challenge of a cooker that predates decimalisation. We made tea and sat on the little wooden deck, and I became aware that I could hear absolutely nothing except birds and the distant sound of someone, somewhere, probably having a much more energetic holiday than us.

The next few days settled into a rhythm so gentle it barely qualified as rhythm at all. Mornings began with coffee outside, wrapped in blankets against the chill that lingered until the sun properly got going. The light here is different, clearer somehow, and it makes everything look slightly unreal, as though you're viewing the world through a favourable Instagram filter that you can't switch off. We walked to the nearby beach at Skagerrak, which took perhaps twenty minutes at the pace of people who had absolutely nowhere to be. The sand is pale and the water is that particular Baltic grey-green that looks freezing and usually is. I paddled once, shrieked, and retreated to a rock with my novel. That became the pattern.

I had brought three books and finished two, which is approximately my annual average. There is something about this place that dismantles your usual impatience. I would read a chapter, stare at the sea, read another paragraph, wonder about lunch. Time became elastic, unmeasured. We cycled to the local shop for supplies, which sounds more adventurous than it was - the terrain is flat as a pancake and the shopkeeper greeted us like old friends by the third visit, presumably because we were the only customers under seventy.

One afternoon I found myself watching a beetle navigate a pebble for what felt like an hour. I mention this not to suggest any profound spiritual transformation, but because it struck me as deeply funny. At home I scroll through my phone during television adverts. Here I was emotionally invested in insect real estate. The slowing down felt almost illicit, like skiving off school.

We explored no further than the immediate surroundings. A nearby nature reserve provided an afternoon of wandering through scrubby grassland, spotting butterflies we couldn't identify and discussing whether various plants were probably not edible. The Alvaret, that strange stony plain that covers much of southern Oland, begins not far from here, and we walked a little way onto it one evening as the light turned golden. It looks like nowhere else, bare and ancient, and standing there I understood why people return to this island year after year.

But mostly we did very little, and that very little felt like enough. We ate simple meals, drank wine that tasted better than its price suggested, and went to bed early because the darkness felt persuasive rather than boring. On our last morning I sat on that deck again, watching the sun climb and considering whether I could reasonably extend this state of pleasant uselessness indefinitely. The cat reappeared, still judgmental, and I offered it a biscuit fragment by way of apology for my earlier performance. It declined, with dignity.

We packed eventually, of course. The drive back to the ferry was quieter than the journey out, not because we had nothing to say but because we seemed to have reached some mutual understanding that words would disturb. I thought about that beetle, and the pebble, and the particular quality of light through pine trees. I thought about how rarely I allow myself to be unproductive, and how good it had felt to fail at that particular ambition so completely.