The trouble with booking a place called Vaetoe is that you spend the entire flight from Gatwick practising how to say it, only to discover upon landing that you have been confidently mangling the pronunciation for three hours straight. I had been telling my partner it was "Vay-toe" with theatrical flair, rolling the imaginary Scandinavian vowel around my mouth like a wine taster. The taxi driver from Arlanda set me straight within thirty seconds. He was far too polite to laugh, but I caught his eye in the rearview mirror and knew.

Our mishap began not with language but with luggage. In my enthusiasm for packing light, I had somehow managed to bring two left wellies. Not one left and one right. Two lefts. We discovered this standing in a puddle outside Stockholm Central Station, where I had insisted we walk to "stretch our legs" after the flight. My partner looked at my feet, then at the grey Swedish sky, then back at my feet. "Brilliant," she said, in that particular British tone that means the opposite. We squelched to a nearby shop near Gamla Stan, where I bought the most expensive pair of sensible boots I have ever owned. I still have them. They are very practical. I hate them slightly.

The taxi to Vaetoe took us through suburbs that looked exactly as I had hoped: red wooden houses, birch trees, the occasional flash of water between buildings. Stockholm does this trick where you forget you are in a capital city. One moment you are passing a supermarket, the next you are looking at a lake with someone kayaking across it in a proper Swedish manner, upright and competent. I felt immediately inadequate about my wellie situation.

Vaetoe itself sits on the island of Varmdo, which sounds remote but is actually rather cleverly connected. The property is one of those classic Swedish wooden houses, painted that particular shade of red that makes you want to use words like "falu" and pretend you know about traditional pigments. It has a small terrace, a proper garden with actual apple trees, and a view through to the water that made my partner stop speaking mid-sentence when she first saw it.

Our host had left the key in a lockbox with a code that worked on the third attempt because I had written it down in my phone upside down. Another small humiliation. But stepping inside, the smell of wood and something faintly maritime, maybe just the proximity of the archipelago, wrapped around us immediately. The living area has one of those wood-burning stoves that Swedes seem to install as standard, and I felt an overwhelming urge to be the sort of person who knows how to use one correctly without setting off a smoke alarm.

I will admit to a moment of gentle self-reflection there, standing in someone else's beautifully simple holiday home, wearing my expensive new boots, holding two left wellies in a carrier bag. I am nearly forty and I still pack like a student going to a music festival. There was something about the clean lines of Vaetoe, the careful placement of a single candlestick, the actual proper coffee machine rather than a jar of instant, that made me consider whether adulthood might be worth attempting more seriously.

The evening light came through the windows in that prolonged Scandinavian way, lasting for hours, turning everything golden and forgiving. We opened a bottle of wine we had bought at Systembolaget, where the queue had moved with terrifying efficiency and the staff had gently corrected my attempt to ask for a "dry white" in Swedish. I produced some hastily purchased cheese and crackers. We sat on that terrace, boots off, and watched a neighbour walk past with a dog that looked better behaved than most children I know.

That first night, I slept better than I had in months. Something about the quiet, broken only by occasional water sounds and what I chose to believe was an owl rather than a seabird with identity issues. I woke early, made coffee with the proper machine, and stood barefoot on the wooden floor feeling improbably content. The wellies sat in the corner, both left, a small monument to my continued incompetence. I did not care. Stockholm had already begun its work on me, and Vaetoe felt immediately like somewhere I wanted to be incompetent in for a good while longer.