The thing about driving through Smaland is that you start to believe every lake in Sweden has been put there just for you. We'd been winding through pine forests for the best part of three hours, the kids finally asleep in the back, when my partner turned to me and said those fateful words: "Did you remember the key code?"

I had not remembered the key code.

I had photographed it, naturally. On my phone. Which was currently sitting on the kitchen counter in Croydon, approximately 900 miles behind us, probably still plugged into the charger like the absolute lemon I am. We pulled over at a petrol station just outside Vetlanda where the woman behind the counter looked at me with the kind of pity usually reserved for people who forget their own birthdays. After twenty minutes of frantic scrolling through emails on my partner's ancient Nokia, we found it buried in a deleted folder. Victory, of a sort.

By the time we reached Odensjo, the late afternoon light was doing that magical Scandinavian thing where everything looks slightly golden and unreal. The cottage sat tucked among birch trees with the lake proper there in front of us, not some distant view but practically at the bottom of the garden. I stepped out of the car and immediately felt the particular smugness that comes from booking somewhere with actual water access. The kids woke up, saw the little wooden jetty, and suddenly nobody cared about being cooped up in a Volvo for half a day.

The cottage itself had that satisfying smell of wood and slightly damp wool that all proper Swedish holiday places seem to have. Nothing fancy, mind you. A straightforward red wooden exterior, white trim, the sort of place that knows exactly what it is and doesn't apologise for it. Inside, low ceilings that made me duck automatically even though I'm not particularly tall, a kitchen that looked like it had hosted a thousand fish suppers, and windows that framed the lake like someone had planned it that way. Which they probably had.

My daughter discovered the rowing boat before I'd even found the kettle. She stood on the jetty doing that anticipatory bouncing children do, the one that suggests patience has never really been her strong suit. I promised we'd take it out after supper, which in June meant sometime around half past nine because the light simply refuses to quit this far north. The whole place operated on that lovely holiday rhythm where mealtimes become suggestions rather than rules.

What struck me most, wandering around that first evening with a cup of tea that tasted slightly of the lake somehow, was how quickly the journey nonsense faded. The key code panic, the service station hot dog I'd eaten in stressed silence, the general parental incompetence of it all. It shrank down to something we'd laugh about later. Probably much later, if I'm honest about how my partner operates.

We barbecued that first night using the little grill on the terrace, nothing ambitious, just sausages and some sad-looking salad from a bag. The kids ate with their fingers. Mosquitoes appeared exactly on schedule and we discovered the previous guests had left a half-empty citronella candle that became our most treasured possession. Someone across the water was having a proper Swedish summer evening too, we could hear voices carrying over, though we never saw them.

I sat there watching my son attempt to skip stones with the athletic confidence of a child who has never successfully skipped a stone in his life, and thought about how these holidays work. Not through perfection, clearly. Through the accumulation of small, slightly messy moments that somehow stitch together into something you want to keep. The lake was perfectly still now, the sky doing its prolonged fade towards that pale northern dusk that never quite gets to proper darkness.

Tomorrow we'd probably walk the forest path down to the little beach area, maybe try our luck at fishing off the jetty with equipment we barely understood. There would be board games with missing pieces, arguments about who last used the sauna, that particular Swedish ritual of heating yourself up and then running down to the water like a maniac. The ordinary magic of a family cottage holiday, basically. No monuments, no must-sees, just the water and the woods and each other, for better and occasionally for worse.

But that first evening, still slightly giddy from the drive and the relief of arrival, it felt like we'd stumbled into exactly the right place at exactly the right speed. Even the forgotten phone had become funny already, though I'd pay for that one later when I couldn't photograph everything obsessively. My partner caught my eye across the terrace, raised her cup in that particular way that means both "you're an idiot" and "I'm glad we're here," and I knew the holiday had properly begun.