I have never been a natural navigator, and my arrival at our holiday cottage in Lombardsijde proved this beyond all doubt. The Sat Nav had been chirping Belgian place names at me for the best part of three hours, and I had long since stopped attempting to pronounce them. My partner, sat in the passenger seat with a packet of slightly stale motorway crisps, had adopted that particular expression of weary patience that comes from knowing better than to offer advice to a lost driver.

The mishap, when it came, was almost impressively mundane. I had been so pleased with myself for successfully navigating the channel crossing and the motorways beyond Brussels that I failed to notice the cottage's key safe code was written on a scrap of paper tucked inside my passport holder, which was currently residing in the glove compartment beneath a road atlas, two bananas, and a raincoat. I discovered this only after twenty minutes of increasingly frantic pocket-patting on the doorstep, during which I managed to knock over a terracotta pot of geraniums with my elbow. The pot survived. My dignity did not.

Lombardsijde itself, when I finally stopped panicking long enough to look properly, revealed itself in that particular Flemish light that makes everything appear slightly more picturesque than it has any right to be. The cottage sat on a quiet lane, the kind where bicycles outnumber cars and every front garden seems to compete in an unofficial competition for neatest box hedge. Ours was a modest place, whitewashed with a steep little roof and windows that looked as though they had been designed specifically for leaning out of on summer mornings. I made a mental note to do exactly this, preferably with coffee, once I had recovered from the key safe ordeal.

The interior delivered that particular smell of old wood and lavender polish that seems universal to holiday lets everywhere, yet somehow comforting for its familiarity. The kitchen was compact in that efficient Belgian way, with a proper coffee machine and a fridge that hummed contentedly to itself. I opened it to find a welcome bottle of local beer and a note in three languages, which I chose to believe was friendly rather than instructional. My Flemish extends barely beyond "please" and "thank you," though I have learned that a smile and some enthusiastic pointing will carry you surprisingly far in these parts.

The sitting room featured a fireplace that looked entirely too optimistic for August, and a collection of seaside watercolours that someone had clearly chosen with genuine affection rather than any pretence at taste. I found myself rather liking them for this. There was also a small terrace out back, where I immediately deposited myself with the rescued beer and surveyed the neighbouring gardens with the satisfied air of someone who had, against considerable odds, actually arrived.

My partner emerged from investigating the bedrooms with reports of clean linen and a bathroom with excellent water pressure, which is the sort of practical intelligence I have come to rely upon. We sat together as the evening light did that slow, golden thing it does in coastal Flanders, and I reflected that perhaps my navigation chaos had been worth it. There is something about the particular quiet of a Flemish village, the sense of orderly calm that pervades even your own disordered arrival, that settles something in you. Or perhaps that was just the beer.

I woke the next morning to the sound of a bicycle bell and the smell of proper coffee, and remembered with some satisfaction that I had absolutely nowhere particular to be.