The sat nav had been chirping confidently for the last hour, so when it suddenly announced we had arrived at a petrol station just outside Trollhattan, I knew something had gone sideways. My wife gave me that look. You know the one. The children, already fractious after the flight to Gothenburg and the hire car faff, began their well-rehearsed chorus of "are we there yet" at precisely the moment I realised I had typed the postcode into Google Maps with a Swedish letter my keyboard could not even produce. We had been driving in a figure of eight around Vastra Gotaland for twenty minutes, passing the same red wooden barn no fewer than three times. I smiled through gritted teeth and blamed the rental car's lack of Apple CarPlay. No one believed me.

Eventually we found our way to Vargons, just west of Vanersborg proper, and there it sat: a proper Swedish holiday home, painted that particular Falun red that makes every British shed look utterly ashamed of itself. The key was in the lockbox as promised, though I spent a good five minutes jabbing the code in upside down before my eldest, aged nine and already technologically superior, simply took it and opened it first try. We stepped inside to that distinctive smell of pine and slightly damp wool that I now realise I associate entirely with Scandinavian childhood holidays I never actually had.

The first thing that struck me was the light. Even at half past four on an October afternoon, the place seemed to glow. Huge windows looked out towards Lake Vanern, though from the ground floor you mostly saw birch trees and the neighbour's exceptionally tidy woodpile. My daughter immediately claimed the loft bedroom, which required a ladder climb she treated like ascending Everest. My son discovered the sauna before I had even located the kettle, and emerged ten minutes later looking like a boiled lobster and claiming it was "basically the best thing ever." I made a mental note to check the temperature settings before he turned himself into a raisin.

I will confess to a moment, standing in that compact but admirably equipped kitchen, where I felt something shift. The past year had been the usual blur of school runs and deadlines and pretending I understood my pension statement. Here, the most pressing decision was whether to walk to the lake now or after I had figured out the coffee maker. I chose coffee, naturally. It took three attempts and some creative button-pressing that may have accidentally set the machine to Finnish, but the resulting brew was strong enough to stand a spoon in, which is exactly how I like it.

By evening, we had established our positions. Children in the loft, plotting mischief. My wife on the sofa with a book she would not read more than six pages of before dozing. Me on the wooden deck, wrapped in a blanket that smelled faintly of previous guests' campfires, watching the last light disappear behind the trees and feeling smug about the wood-burning stove I had already stacked with birch logs. Tomorrow we might walk to the lake shore, or drive the few minutes into Vanersborg for supplies, or simply do very little at all. That was rather the point. For now, the sat nav disaster felt like it had happened to someone else entirely, and I was already composing how I would tell the story later, making myself sound slightly less of an idiot than I actually was. Some things, I suspect, are universal holiday traditions.