I have never been so grateful for a sat-nav with a sense of humour, if you can call repeatedly telling me to "turn around when possible" humorous. My partner and I were bound for a little place called Hoeganaes, just outside Farhult in Skane, and somehow we had managed to miss the turning three times. The third time involved a rather sheepish U-turn in a farm entrance, during which I knocked over a wheelie bin with an almighty clatter that sent a murder of crows skyward. A bloke in a neighbouring garden paused his mowing to watch. I gave him the sort of wave you give when you have absolutely no defence.

We found it eventually, down a narrow lane that felt less like a road and more like a suggestion. The cottage sat there in the afternoon light, red wooden walls and white trim, looking like something from a children's programme about sensible Scandinavian life. I stepped out of the car and immediately felt that particular quality of Skane sunshine, the kind that seems to have more patience than English sun, as though it is perfectly happy to just keep doing its thing while you figure yourself out.

The key was in the lockbox, which I fumbled with for an embarrassingly long time. My partner, ever the pragmatist, took over and had it open in seconds. I told myself this was teamwork. Inside, the smell was immediately noticeable in the best way: pine, something faintly herby, and that particular clean scent of a place that has been properly aired. The windows were enormous, practically inviting the outside in, and through them I could see nothing but green and gold, fields rolling away without any particular urgency about where they were going.

I had packed three books, which even I recognised as optimistic given we were only staying a week. There they sat in my bag, already seeming wiser than me. We had brought walking boots too, proper serious ones, and I looked at them now with the fond scepticism you reserve for your own good intentions. The cottage had a deck, weathered to that perfect silver-grey, and two chairs that looked like they had been waiting specifically for people with no particular place to be.

We did not do much that first afternoon, which was precisely the point I had been trying to make to myself for months. We sat. We drank coffee from the little machine that gurgled like a contented animal. I watched a bumblebee the size of a conker investigate a flower pot for what felt like half an hour, though I suppose it might have been five minutes. Time moves differently when you stop checking it.

My partner fell asleep in the chair, book open on chest, and I felt that rare, almost forgotten sensation of being genuinely glad for someone else's peace. I had been running on something for too long, caffeine and obligation probably, and here was this place offering nothing except the radical proposition that doing very little might actually be enough.

The light shifted, became longer and more golden, and somewhere in the distance I could hear what I later learned was a Skane tractor, moving through a field with the same unhurried pace as everything else here. I thought about the wheelie bin, the crows, the man with his lawnmower. I thought about how I had spent the last year measuring myself in tasks completed, emails sent, miles covered. None of that seemed to apply here.

That evening we walked to the little local shop, barely ten minutes away, and bought bread and cheese and something called filmjolk that I pronounced wrong and the shopkeeper kindly pretended not to notice. We ate on the deck as the light finally softened into something like evening, though it never seemed to fully commit to darkness, not in June, not in Skane.

I opened one of my books that night, read perhaps three pages, and fell asleep with it still in my hands. It was perfect.