I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I put the sat nav postcode into my phone and it tried to send me to a fish processing plant in Denmark. Turns out there is more than one Hoganas in Scandinavia, and I very nearly spent my week off staring at cod rather than the Skane coastline. Forty-five minutes of increasingly tense roundabout navigation later, I realised my error, performed a sheepish U-turn in a tractor layby, and finally pointed the hire car towards the proper address.

The drive from Copenhagen Airport had been pleasant enough, flat green fields giving way to the characteristic Skane landscape of rolling farmland and sudden glimpses of the Oresund strait. I had the windows down and a terrible Swedish pop playlist going, feeling terribly continental. The mishap only added to my frazzled arrival, and by the time I pulled up to the little cluster of wooden holiday homes at Hoganas, I was ready to collapse onto the nearest horizontal surface.

The key was in a lockbox, which I fumbled with for an embarrassing length of time while a local dog walker observed my struggle with what I can only describe as polite Scandinavian concern. Eventually the door swung open and I stepped into the sort of simple, airy space that makes you immediately exhale. White walls, light wood floors, a kitchen that looked like it had actually been used by real humans rather than styled for a magazine. I dumped my bags unceremoniously in the hallway and made straight for the sofa, where I remained horizontal for a solid hour, watching dust motes dance in the afternoon sun through the large windows.

My first proper exploration came later, when hunger finally overcame laziness. The property sits in that perfect Skane zone where you feel genuinely rural yet can wander to useful things. I pottered down to the nearby shoreline path, more a gentle amble than a walk, and found a bench facing the water. The Oresund stretched grey-blue to the horizon, the Danish coast invisible in the haze. A couple of locals passed with a dog that looked significantly more exercised than its owners. I sat there until my legs went stiff, doing absolutely nothing productive, and felt genuinely thrilled about it.

The following days settled into a rhythm so lazy it barely qualified as a rhythm. Morning coffee on the small terrace, watching the light change over the fields behind the property. A slow walk to the local shop for provisions, where I practised my three words of Swedish on a patient cashier. Afternoons with a book in the garden, occasionally shifting my chair to follow the sun like a particularly lethargic sundial. I read three novels in five days, a personal record for my adult life, and cannot recall a single plot point of any of them. They served their purpose perfectly.

One afternoon I cycled to a nearby beach, following flat lanes through farmland where the wheat stood golden and heavy. The beach itself was modest, a strip of sand and smooth stones, with families scattered at respectful distances. I paddled briefly, decided the Baltic was still rather fresh for my tastes, and retreated to a dune to continue my important research into doing nothing whatsoever.

Evenings brought the particular joy of self-catering without ambition. Simple meals assembled from the local shop, eaten on the terrace as the light stretched long across the fields. I discovered that Swedish cider comes in surprisingly large bottles and made this discovery several times. One night I attempted to identify constellations using a phone app and succeeded mainly in convincing myself I had found Orion's belt in three completely different parts of the sky.

The gentle self-reflection came on my final morning, packing the car with the reluctant slowness of someone who has genuinely unwound. I realised how thoroughly I had stopped trying to make experiences happen, stopped photographing everything for future sharing, stopped treating relaxation as something to optimise. The fish processing plant sat nav disaster now felt like the perfect beginning, a reminder that the best holidays contain some mild chaos at the start to make the subsequent stillness feel earned.

I drove away slowly, already plotting a return, and promptly missed my turning for the main road.