The sat nav gave up on us just outside Hoorby, which I suppose should have been our first clue that this holiday was going to be properly Swedish. Not the polished, IKEA-version of Sweden, but the real deal with narrow lanes, sudden birch forests, and that particular stillness that makes you realise how much noise your own brain usually makes.

We had been driving from Malmo since mid-morning, a journey that started with me confidently declaring I did not need to download offline maps. Reader, I needed offline maps. The seasonal shift had turned the Skane landscape into something between late summer and early autumn, that liminal fortnight where the rapeseed fields have gone from yellow to stubble, and the light takes on a honeyed quality that makes everything look like a film set. I kept pointing this out to my partner, who was too busy navigating a tractor coming the other way to appreciate my observations.

The mishap came at the final turning. A signpost had gone missing, presumably taken out by the same tractor population we kept encountering, and I made an executive decision to follow what I believed was a "short cut" through a farm track. It was not a short cut. It was a beet field access road, and within approximately ninety seconds we were axle-deep in mud that had been softened by the previous week's rain. September in Skane, we were learning, keeps one foot in summer warmth and the other in autumn's wet reality.

I got out to assess the situation with the authority of someone who has absolutely no mechanical knowledge. My welly sank immediately. The mud made a sound like a disapproving aunt. My partner sat in the driver's seat with the expression of someone who has heard me say "I'm sure this is the way" approximately four hundred times before.

A farmer appeared from nowhere, which is a skill I have since learned all Skane farmers possess. He did not laugh, not outwardly, though his eyes did something sympathetic. With a tractor and what I can only describe as deeply Swedish patience, he had us out in five minutes. He asked if we were staying at the Sjoebo, as if this happened every Tuesday. Perhaps it does.

The property itself materialised through a corridor of apple trees heavy with fruit that nobody had bothered to pick yet. The seasonal timing meant we had arrived in that sweet spot after the summer crowds but before the proper cold sets in. The garden was doing its best impression of organised chaos, herbaceous borders collapsing into their autumn colours, the lawn scattered with windfalls that attracted a respectable population of wasps. The air smelled of overripe fruit and woodsmoke from somewhere distant.

Inside, the house had that particular quality of Scandinavian country properties, where everything is simultaneously rustic and improbably functional. The kitchen windows faced west, and that honey light poured in at an angle that made the dust motes look choreographed. I found myself standing there with my bag still on my shoulder, watching it, suddenly aware of how long it had been since I had watched light move through a room without checking my phone.

The season had left the house in a state of gentle transition. Summer cushions still on the sofa, but a basket of firewood stacked ready beside the stove. The garden furniture looked slightly surprised to still be outside. On the terrace, a single tomato plant in a pot had given up producing fruit and was now concentrating on turning a dramatic yellow.

We opened a bottle of something local and sat outside as the evening cooled, watching the wasps get drunk on fallen apples and the light fade across the flat agricultural landscape. The mishap with the mud already felt like the necessary price of admission, the story we would tell later that made the place feel earned rather than merely visited. The season had made the house feel borrowed rather than rented, something we were looking after during its brief pause between summer's busyness and whatever winter brings to this quiet corner of Skane.