I should have known the sat nav was up to no good the moment it tried to send me through what looked suspiciously like someone's back garden. There we were, five hours after leaving Copenhagen Airport, trundling down yet another narrow lane in Skane, convinced we'd missed Ystad entirely and were probably halfway to Norway by now. My partner, ever the optimist, kept insisting the cottage was "just round the next bend." The cottage, as it turned out, was just round the seventh bend, and by that point I'd managed to reverse into a wooden post while trying to turn round, leaving a small but deeply embarrassing dent in the hire car that I still haven't owned up to the insurance company about.

The thing about Swedish country lanes is that they look utterly identical after dark. Flat fields, occasional farmhouse, more flat fields. We'd flown in during that grim November window when the sun clocks off at half past three and leaves you to fend for yourself. By the time we spotted the little wooden sign for Hunnestad, I'd gone through all five stages of holiday grief and was settling comfortably into a sixth I'd invented myself, something involving quiet muttering and excessive crisp consumption.

But then we turned into the gravel drive, and I rather forgot to be cross.

The cottage sat there like something from a children's illustration, all red timber and white trim, with a proper porch light glowing amber against the black. I've stayed in enough holiday lets to know the difference between somewhere that's genuinely cared for and somewhere that's simply photographed well. This was the real article. The owners had left the heating on low, so pushing open that front door felt like being welcomed into someone's actual home rather than a furnished box. There was even a handwritten note propped against a jar of what turned out to be homemade apple chutney, which we opened immediately and ate with our fingers while standing in the kitchen, too tired to find proper cutlery.

I think what struck me first was the smell. Not that artificial vanilla nonsense you get in chain hotels, but something woodier, older. The sort of scent that comes from decades of proper fires and proper timber and probably a fair bit of proper Swedish stubbornness about keeping traditional houses exactly as they should be. The living room had one of those enormous stoves that dominates everything, black and slightly crooked, clearly installed by someone who knew precisely what they were doing sometime around 1952.

We'd brought supplies from Ystad, having made a frantic supermarket sweep earlier that afternoon when we realised quite how rural Hunnestad actually is. The kitchen was better equipped than my flat in Clapham, which says more about my flat than anything, but still. Proper knives. A coffee maker that looked like it meant business. We made a terrible mess of some local sausages and felt genuinely accomplished about it, sitting at the wooden table with our feet up on the spare chairs, too exhausted to explore further.

I remember looking out the kitchen window before bed, past the little garden and towards the fields beyond. Absolute blackness, complete silence except for something that might have been an owl or might have been my imagination running slightly wild after too much travel. My partner had already fallen asleep on the sofa, mouth open, still wearing one slipper. I left them there for twenty minutes, partly out of affection and partly because I was enjoying the quiet selfishness of having this new place entirely to myself for a little while.

The dent in the car could wait. The sat nav had already been firmly relegated to the glove compartment. We were here, finally, in a red wooden cottage in the flatlands of Skane, and I had apple chutney on my jumper and absolutely no regrets about any of it.