I have always believed that the best holidays begin with a small disaster, and our trip to Hoganas in Skane did not disappoint. We had been driving up from Malmo, full of that smug energy you get when you think you have planned everything perfectly. The boot was packed with books I would definitely read, wine I would definitely drink, and a carefully curated playlist of Swedish pop that my partner had insisted upon. Somewhere near Lund, I realised with a creeping horror that I had left our booking confirmation on the kitchen table in London. Not on my phone. Not in my email. On actual paper, six hundred miles away, probably being inspected by our cat.

We pulled into a petrol station and I performed the sort of frantic pocket-patting that makes you look like you have lost a winning lottery ticket. My partner, who possesses the patience of a saint and the memory of an elephant, simply opened her phone and showed me the email she had sensibly saved three months ago. I spent the remaining hour of the drive in contemplative silence, reflecting on why I insist on printing things only to immediately render them useless.

The cottage sat at the end of a narrow track, surrounded by fields that rolled away in that particular soft green you only seem to find in southern Sweden. It was smaller than it had looked in the photographs, which somehow made it better. A red wooden facade, white trim, the whole thing looking like it had been built by someone who understood that the point of a holiday home is to make you feel slightly smug about your excellent taste. I unpacked the books first. There were six of them. I would read perhaps one and a half, and this knowledge did not trouble me in the slightest.

Our first morning began with coffee on the small terrace, watching light move across the grass in a way that made checking my phone feel like an act of violence against the day. We had brought bicycles and used them exactly twice, both times to visit the village shop for supplies we did not strictly need. The rest of the time we walked, slowly, along lanes bordered by hawthorn and wild roses, nodding at locals who seemed unsurprised to find foreigners doing very little with such obvious dedication.

I developed a serious relationship with a particular deckchair. It lived on the little patch of lawn behind the cottage, positioned to catch the afternoon sun without the indignity of full exposure. From here I could see a small shed, some fruit trees, and a sky that seemed to go on forever in that flat Scandinavian way. I read the same paragraph of my novel approximately forty times, sometimes finishing it, more often letting my attention drift to a bumblebee or a passing cloud. This felt like an achievement. It was certainly the point.

The village of Hoganas itself required perhaps twenty minutes of purposeful wandering. A pottery workshop, a harbour where small boats sat in water so calm it looked staged, a cafe where we ate cardamom buns and felt pleased with ourselves for ordering in stumbling Swedish. We never once felt the urge to drive farther afield. Someone had mentioned Helsingborg, but the very idea seemed exhausting, almost rude to the particular rhythm we had established.

Evenings followed their own lazy logic. A simple dinner, wine that tasted better than it probably was, a walk as the light finally began to fade around ten. I had packed a running kit. It remained untouched at the bottom of my bag, a silent reproach I chose to ignore. The books sat in their stack, gradually being rearranged according to mood rather than progress.

On our final afternoon, I achieved what I can only describe as peak holiday nothingness. Three hours in the deckchair, no book, no phone, just the warmth on my face and the distant sound of a tractor. I thought about my abandoned booking confirmation, my untouched running shoes, my unread books. I felt no guilt whatsoever. Some holidays are for seeing things, ticking boxes, accumulating experiences like stamps in a passport. Others are for remembering that doing very little, in the right place, with the right light, is its own kind of plenty.