I have never been so grateful for a cup of tea in my entire life. After three hours on the Eurostar, a slightly panicked dash across Brussels Midi, and what felt like an eternity on a local train that stopped at every field and cow between Ghent and Bruges, I finally arrived at the holiday home I'd booked in the outskirts of the city. Or at least, I thought I had arrived. The sat nav on my phone had other ideas.

The mishap, because there is always one with me, came within minutes of stepping off the train. In my eagerness to get to the property before dark, I had packed my wheelie case with what can only be described as criminal optimism. The cobbles of Bruges, so charming in photographs, are an absolute menace when you are dragging seventeen kilograms of unnecessary clothing behind you. My case caught on a ridge, tipped sideways, and deposited my entire collection of socks and a rather embarrassing novel onto the pavement outside a very serious-looking chocolate shop. A man in a tweed jacket watched this unfold with the kind of silent judgement only the Belgians can truly perfect. I scooped everything up, muttered "dank u wel" to no one in particular, and marched off in entirely the wrong direction.

Twenty minutes later, standing outside a canal that looked nothing like the property photos, I admitted defeat and rang the owner. Turns out I had walked past the turning twice. The house sits in a quiet residential pocket, tucked away from the tourist thrum, and I had been seduced by a prettier canal path that led absolutely nowhere useful.

When I finally found it, fumbling with the key box like a burglar having a particularly off day, the place revealed itself in stages. First the little garden, slightly overgrown in that deliberate Belgian way, with a bench that looked like it had witnessed several decades of contemplative cigarette smoking. Then the kitchen, compact but properly equipped, not one of those holiday rentals where you open a drawer to find a single bent fork and a can opener from 1973. I put the kettle on immediately, because I am British and because I had earned it.

The living area had that particular Flemish quality of being both tidy and slightly lived-in, as if someone respectable had just stepped out for a moment. Beamed ceiling, wooden floors that creaked in specific spots, windows that actually opened properly rather than fighting you like a stuck drawer. I stood there with my tea, still wearing my coat, and felt the particular relief of a place that is going to be all right. Not flashy, not trying to be something it is not, just solid and calm and waiting for you to catch up with it.

I unpacked eventually, though not before sitting on that garden bench with a second cup and watching a neighbour walk past with a dog that looked deeply unimpressed by everything. The evening light had that soft Flemish quality, the kind that makes you understand why painters bothered with all those centuries of landscapes. I thought about the wrong turn, the scattered socks, the tweed man's silent verdict. None of it mattered now. I had arrived, more or less, and sometimes that is enough.