I have never been so grateful for a thermos of tea in my entire life. There we were, my partner and I, crawling along a gravel track somewhere west of Gothenburg in our hire car, convinced the sat nav had finally lost the plot. The drizzle had turned to something more committed, and I had just spilled half a flask of Yorkshire Tea onto my own knee while trying to navigate a puddle the size of a small pond. Welcome to our autumn break in Vastra Gotaland.

We had booked a traditional Swedish holiday home, one of those charming red wooden places you see in photographs, set on what the listing called a tjoern. I later learned this means a small forest lake, though at that particular moment, with the windscreen wipers going full pelt, every body of water in Sweden felt roughly the same size. The mishap with the tea set the tone nicely. My partner was laughing too hard to help me mop up, and I sat there with a damp trouser leg, wondering if this was the hygge everyone kept banging on about.

The season had turned properly by the time we arrived in late October. The birch trees were dropping their last yellow leaves, and the whole landscape felt like it was shutting up shop for the year. This is not the Sweden of midsummer dreams and midnight sun. This is the Sweden that teaches you why Swedes invented decent lighting and thick socks. Our tjoern property sat among pine and spruce, the lake itself visible through bare branches that rattled like dry bones whenever the wind picked up.

First impressions of the house were immediate and overwhelming warmth. Not emotional warmth, though that came later. Literal warmth. The owner had left the underfloor heating running and a wood burner stacked with birch logs. After three hours of driving through grey Swedish countryside, stepping inside felt like being folded into a freshly toasted sandwich. The smell of pine from the walls mixed with something faintly smoky, and I stood there in my still-damp trousers, refusing to move until my knees stopped complaining.

The light at that time of year is something you cannot prepare for. We arrived mid-afternoon, and by four the sky had already begun its slow fade to charcoal. The windows of the house, which would have framed sparkling blue water in July, now reflected back our own surprised faces against a backdrop of deepening gloom. It sounds depressing. It was not. There is a particular intimacy to a house that wraps itself around you so early in the day. We found ourselves talking more, moving slower, actually looking at each other across the table rather than past each other at screens.

I stepped outside before dinner, needing to prove something to myself about hardiness or character. The cold bit immediately at my ears, and the lake had that flat, heavy look water gets before it considers freezing. No birdsong. Just the occasional crack from the forest as something shifted in the dropping temperature. I lasted four minutes, long enough to fetch more firewood and confirm that I am, in fact, a creature of central heating and comfortable delusion.

That first evening, we cooked badly. The kitchen was better equipped than our flat in Manchester, but we were too busy watching the wood burner, too distracted by the strange pleasure of being genuinely cosy while the world outside turned properly hostile. We burned the first attempt at whatever stew we were attempting, laughed about it, ate crackers and cheese instead, and were asleep by ten.

The season had forced a pace upon us that I did not know I needed. No long walks to distant attractions, no pressure to make the most of daylight that stretches until midnight. Just the immediate world of the house, the tjoern, the surrounding trees, and the slow realisation that doing very little in good company is sometimes the most honest kind of rest. I thought I had come to see Sweden. What I found was something quieter, more seasonal, and far more necessary than I had expected.