I should have known the sat nav was up to no good the moment it tried to send me through what looked like someone's back garden in the middle of Skane. Three and a half hours from Copenhagen Airport, two coffees, one slightly tense roundabout moment in Malmo, and there I was, crawling down a gravel track convinced I'd booked a holiday in a beet field.

The mishap came five minutes from the property. I'd stopped to photograph a particularly handsome red cottage, phone in one hand, complimentary airline biscuit in the other, when the biscuit made a break for freedom straight into the footwell. I bent to retrieve it, the car rolled slightly, and I clipped a wooden fence post with my wing mirror. Not hard enough to damage anything except my dignity, but quite hard enough for a nearby horse to give me a look of profound Swedish judgement.

I arrived at the Oerkelljunga Munka Ljungby property with biscuit crumbs down my jumper and a faint sense of cosmic punishment. The owners had mentioned it was tucked away, but nothing quite prepares you for that first glimpse of proper rural seclusion. The house sat among mature trees with a garden that seemed to have been arranged by someone with excellent taste and absolutely no hurry. My shoulders dropped about three inches before I'd even turned off the engine.

The key was exactly where they'd said, in a little wooden box with a combination lock that I fumbled twice because I was still flustered about the fence post. The door opened with that satisfying weight of a well-made Swedish house, and I stepped into a hallway that smelled faintly of pine and something baking from the neighbour's direction. The floors were wooden, properly worn in the way that makes you want to walk barefoot immediately.

I dumped my case without ceremony and did what any sensible person does first: opened every door. The kitchen was straightforward and unpretentious, the sort that actually wants you to cook rather than admire it. The sitting room had a wood-burning stove that I mentally bookmarked for later, and windows looking out onto nothing but green. No other buildings in sight. Just trees, a glimpse of what I later learned was a small lake through the foliage, and that particular quality of light you get in Skane when the afternoon stretches long and golden.

The bedroom upstairs had sloped ceilings that demanded I duck unnecessarily, and a bed that looked like it had witnessed several generations of solid Swedish sleep. I opened the window and heard absolutely nothing human. Birds, wind in leaves, distant water. That was the lot. The horse judgement felt very far away suddenly.

I made tea with the supplies I'd brought, because I am British and priorities are priorities, and sat on the little wooden deck with my mug and the remains of my dignity. The biscuit incident already felt like it had happened to someone else. Somewhere across the garden, a squirrel was conducting important business in a birch tree. The sun moved slowly across the lawn. I thought about the emails I wasn't answering and found, to my slight surprise, that I didn't care.

By evening I'd established that the local shop in OErkelljunga was a ten-minute drive, that the nearest proper walking path started practically at the garden gate, and that I was going to sleep better than I had in months. The wood burner sat waiting. The silence sat waiting too, patient and complete.

I never did find that biscuit.