I have never been so grateful to see a wooden gate in all my life. Three hours of driving from Arlanda, two wrong turns around what I am fairly certain was the same roundabout twice, and one spectacular argument with a sat nav that insisted "Brottby" was pronounced "Broff-tee-bee," and there it finally was: our little red cottage peeking through the pines like something from a postcard I would later buy and forget to send.

The mishap, because there always is one with us, happened roughly forty minutes earlier. My partner had spotted a petrol station and, in that peculiar holiday logic where you suddenly need snacks you would never touch at home, we stopped for provisions. I emerged triumphant with a bag of something called "saltlakrits," which I assumed was salted popcorn. Reader, it was not. The faces my children made upon tasting proper Swedish salty liquorice will haunt me until my dying day. I have never seen a seven-year-old achieve such eloquent disgust without uttering a single word. We abandoned the bag on the passenger seat, where it would remain for the entire week as a sort of talisman against overconfidence.

But back to the gate. It stuck, naturally. I heaved and grunted while my partner filmed me for posterity, and the kids performed that particular dance of embarrassment and amusement that they have perfected in recent years. When it finally gave way with a squeal that probably disturbed every bird in Uppland, we crunched up the gravel drive and simply stopped to look.

The cottage sat among birch trees with their pale bark catching the afternoon light, and beyond it I could see the glint of what I later learned was a small lake, one of those countless Swedish waters that locals probably think nothing of but which struck me as impossibly romantic. The air smelled of pine resin and woodsmoke from some distant chimney, and something else too - that clean, slightly metallic scent of proper cold that you forget exists when you live in a city.

My first impression, once I had stopped being smug about finding the place, was how immediately it felt like somewhere you could exhale. Not in that staged, interior-magazine way, but in the sense that nothing here demanded performance. The veranda had a bench with paint worn thin in patches. The windows were slightly crooked in their frames. A pair of wellingtons sat by the door that clearly belonged to someone else but had been left for whoever needed them. I found this unaccountably moving, though I would not admit it at the time.

The children had already disappeared around the back, drawn by the promise of a garden that seemed to dissolve into proper forest. I could hear them arguing about whether a particular tree was climbable, which meant they were happy. My partner was attempting to decipher the key safe with the concentration of someone defusing a bomb.

I stood there with my ridiculous bag of rejected liquorice and my slightly muddy shoes, listening to the particular silence of a place where human noise is the exception rather than the rule. Somewhere a woodpecker was doing its industrious thing. The light was already beginning to soften into that long, golden evening that Swedish summers do so well, and I felt something in my shoulders release that I had not realised I was holding.

We would spend the week doing very little of consequence: swimming in that lake, which was bracing in a way that makes you feel briefly heroic; cooking simple meals on the little stove; walking through woods where blueberries grew thick enough to stain fingers purple. But in that first moment of arrival, tired and slightly ridiculous and still laughing about the liquorice, I understood that this was exactly what we had needed. Not an escape from ordinary life, but a reminder that ordinary life, done properly, contains everything necessary for happiness.

The key safe finally clicked open. My partner raised it in triumph. The children emerged from the trees with a frog they absolutely could not keep, and I picked up our bags with a sense of anticipation that felt properly, uncomplicatedly good.