I have never been so relieved to see a wooden veranda in my life. Twelve hours after leaving London, three trains, one hire car that smelled faintly of fish, and a spectacular navigational blunder that saw us doing a full circuit of Helgasjon Lake while trying to find a road that was literally fifty metres from our starting point, we finally rocked up at our little cabin in Evedal. My partner was not speaking to me. I had eaten nothing but a petrol station hot dog since Copenhagen. The Swedes do many things brilliantly, but their motorway catering is not, perhaps, their finest cultural export.

The cabin itself was immediately forgiving. Red timber, proper pine smell, a kitchen that looked like someone had actually cooked in it rather than just staged it for photographs. I dumped our bags and opened the fridge, which contained a single jar of pickled herring left by some previous tenant and a bottle of local beer that I chose to believe was a welcome gift rather than an oversight by the cleaners. I drank the beer while standing at the window, watching the lake do that glassy Swedish thing it does at dusk, and felt the particular shame of the directionally challenged beginning to lift.

We had brought supplies from a supermarket in Vaxjo that afternoon, though "supplies" rather overstates the organisational rigour involved. My partner had grabbed sensible things: eggs, proper coffee, a loaf of dense rye bread, some excellent Swedish butter. I had panic-bought a vacuum-packed lump of falukorv sausage, three different mustards, and something called "messmor" that I later discovered was whey butter and absolutely not what you want on toast when you are expecting something marmalade-adjacent. The first evening's "self-catering attempt" was, in retrospect, a cautionary tale. I fried slices of the falukorv with potatoes and somehow produced a meal that was simultaneously undercooked and burnt, a culinary paradox I did not think possible with such forgiving ingredients. My partner ate it without comment, which was worse than criticism.

Morning brought redemption in the form of the Vaxjo market, a proper Tuesday affair in the town centre that we stumbled upon while attempting to buy more coffee. The smell of fresh cardamom buns from a bakery stall stopped me physically in my tracks. I bought two, then immediately returned for four more, plus a loaf of vortbrod that the baker explained was a sort of malted rye traditionally eaten before fasting but in practice eaten whenever one feels like it, which in my case was immediately and continuously. There was a fishmonger selling smoked fish from the lake, silvery things I did not recognise, and a woman with a vast table of mushrooms she had foraged herself, which she described with the particular pride of someone who has not yet been poisoned by their hobby.

That evening I attempted proper cooking. The cabin's kitchen had decent knives, a cast iron pan, and enough counter space to actually work. I fried the smoked fish with butter and dill, made potatoes with the forest mushrooms, and opened a bottle of beer from a local brewery I cannot now name but whose label featured an extremely serious moose. It was simple food, eaten on the veranda as the light stretched out past nine o'clock, and it tasted of the particular satisfaction that comes from having done something adequately after a period of notable inadequacy.

The messmor, incidentally, became excellent on crispbread with cheese. Some mistakes, like wrong turns around lakes, eventually find their purpose.