I have never been so grateful to see a wooden veranda in all my life. After a twelve-hour schlep from Manchester that involved two flights, a train with a broken coffee machine, and a hire car that smelled faintly of pickled herring, I finally pulled up at the little red cottage in Lilla Edet. I was shattered, slightly delirious, and absolutely convinced I had left my phone charger in the glove compartment of a Volvo in Gothenburg. Reader, I had not. It was in my pocket the entire time. I discovered this after twenty minutes of increasingly frantic patting while standing in a gravel driveway, muttering to myself like a man who had forgotten how to be a functioning adult.

The cottage sat there looking impossibly Swedish, all crisp white trim and sensible angles, as if it had been patiently waiting for me to stop being an idiot. I fumbled with the key box, dropped the code sheet in a puddle, and finally stumbled through the front door with all the grace of a moose on roller skates.

And then I stopped. Just stopped. Because the inside was nothing like the functional Scandinavian minimalism I had expected. The living room wrapped around me like a wool blanket, all honey-coloured pine walls and soft lamplight. Someone had left a little bowl of apples on the table, actual real apples that smelled of actual orchards rather than supermarket polish. I stood there in my damp socks, hire car keys still clutched in my hand, and felt something in my chest loosen for the first time in weeks.

The kitchen window looked straight out onto trees. Proper trees, not the sad municipal plantings I was used to back home. Birch and pine and something else I could not identify because I am a man who struggles with houseplants, let alone forestry. There was a proper wood-burning stove in the corner, all black iron and promise, and I immediately decided I was going to be brilliant at using it despite having never successfully lit a barbecue without industrial assistance.

I dumped my bags with theatrical exhaustion and explored the upstairs, finding bedrooms with sloped ceilings that demanded you duck respectfully. The beds were made with that tight, satisfying Scandinavian precision, corners tucked like gifts. I flopped onto one just to test it, as if this were a necessary scientific procedure, and nearly fell asleep in my coat.

Downstairs again, I made the obligatory terrible instant coffee with the complementary sachets and carried it out onto that veranda. The evening had turned soft and grey, that particular Swedish light that makes everything look slightly magical without trying very hard. Somewhere in the distance, water moved, the Gota alv river doing its ancient thing. A bird made a noise I had never heard before. I did not know what it was, and I did not care. It was perfect.

I thought about the journey, the charger panic, the pickled herring car. I thought about how I had spent the last six months telling myself I needed a break while doing absolutely nothing about it. And I thought about how sometimes you have to drop your code sheet in a puddle and mutter at yourself in a gravel driveway to finally arrive somewhere that feels like it has been waiting for you all along.

I finished my terrible coffee. I did not light the stove, because I am not a complete fantasist. But I sat there until the mosquitoes politely reminded me that paradise has small print, and then I went inside, closed the door, and slept for ten hours without moving once.