I have never been so relieved to see a red wooden house in my life. After six hours of driving from Gothenburg, two wrong turns near Jonkoping, and one spectacular argument with a sat nav that clearly fancied itself as a rally co-driver, we finally crawled up the gravel track to our Huskvarna cottage. The mishap? I had somehow packed three left wellies, zero right ones, and convinced myself this was an acceptable state of affairs until my wife pointed out I was walking in circles trying to find the matching pair. Three left wellies. I am forty-two years old.

The cottage sat among proper Smaland forest, all pine and birch and that particular hush you only get when there are more trees than people. Red paint, white trim, the whole Scandinavian postcard. A proper timber place with a little porch where someone, probably decades ago, had left a wooden moose that now looked permanently surprised by its own existence. I liked it immediately. The key was in a lockbox that took me four attempts because I was still wearing two left wellies and had the balance of a newborn deer.

Inside smelled of pine and something else, something clean and old at the same time. The living room had one of those wood-burning stoves that dominates everything, black and serious, like it was waiting for you to prove yourself worthy. My daughter immediately claimed the window seat, a deep wooden ledge with cushions that looked hand-made, and announced she could see a squirrel. She could not see a squirrel. She saw a pine cone and got overexcited. This set the tone nicely.

The kitchen was compact in that way that makes you realise how much nonsense you have at home. Four plates, decent knives, a kettle that whistled like it meant business. No dishwasher, which my wife noted with a look that said we would be having words about the washing-up rota. I opened the fridge to find it empty and clean and slightly too cold, which felt like both a challenge and a promise. We had brought supplies from a supermarket in Jonkoping, including what I believed to be Swedish meatballs but later discovered were something called kottbullar that came in a jar and were apparently not the same thing at all. I am still not clear on the distinction. They tasted fine fried with butter at any rate.

The bedrooms were upstairs, steep wooden stairs that creaked with genuine personality, not the polite creak of a new build trying to seem rustic. Our room had a double bed with a proper thick duvet, the kind that makes you understand why Scandinavians do not bother with top sheets. The children's room had two singles pushed under a sloping ceiling, and my son immediately tested whether he could stand upright in the corner. He could not. He was delighted.

By late afternoon we had established our pattern without really discussing it. I wrestled with the stove and some birch logs that were apparently too green, filling the room with theatrical smoke before it finally caught. My wife unpacked with the efficiency of someone who has learned not to trust my packing, which was fair. The children discovered a deck of cards with Swedish kings on them and invented a game where the rules changed every three minutes and somehow they always won.

We ate outside as the light went, which took its time because this was June and Smaland does not rush its evenings. The mosquitoes came out in polite numbers, nothing like the horror stories I had prepared for, and we had forgotten proper repellent anyway so we just slapped our legs and carried on. The kottbullar, or whatever they were, sat in a frying pan on the little gas hob we had carried out, and we ate them with bread and some strange cheese that my wife had selected based entirely on having the most interesting packaging.

I sat there with two left wellies drying by the door, watching my daughter attempt to feed a pine cone to the wooden moose, and felt something shift. Not a grand revelation. Just the realisation that I had been braced for something, some discomfort or disappointment, and instead had found this ordinary perfection. A red house. A slow evening. My son explaining at length why Swedish card kings were superior to British ones because they had better moustaches.

The stove crackled inside. Somewhere an actual squirrel, not a pine cone, moved through the trees. I had three left wellies and no regrets at all.