I have never been brilliant with sat navs, and my attempt to reach our holiday cottage near Poperinge proved this beyond all doubt. Somewhere between Calais and West Flanders, I managed to interpret "continue straight" as "take this adorable rural diversion," which led my family through three unnecessary villages, one very narrow bridge that made my wife close her eyes, and a brief but spirited argument about whether I had done this deliberately to see the countryside. I had not, though the countryside was admittedly lovely.

We arrived at the cottage forty minutes later than planned, which in family holiday terms meant the children had progressed from "are we nearly there?" to a profound silence that was somehow more threatening. The property sat at the end of a quiet lane, surrounded by flat farmland and the occasional poplar tree standing to attention like a sentry. My first thought was that it looked exactly as promised in the photographs, which never happens. My second thought was that I had parked slightly on what might have been the neighbour's verge, though the neighbour appeared to be a field of hops, so I felt reasonably safe.

The key was in the lockbox as instructed, and I managed the code on my third attempt, which I considered a personal triumph. Stepping inside, the smell hit me immediately: that particular blend of wood polish, slightly damp stone, and the ghost of a thousand previous frying pans. It smelled like a proper holiday cottage, not a hotel pretending to be something rustic. The living area opened directly into a kitchen that looked like it had seen some genuinely enthusiastic cooking over the years, and I found this oddly comforting. A pristine kitchen in a holiday let always makes me nervous, like staying in someone's show home and worrying about breathing on the furniture.

My son discovered the garden within approximately ninety seconds, which is impressive considering he had not displayed such efficiency for any household task in his entire life. It was modest but green, backing onto more of those hop fields that define this corner of Flanders. Poperinge sits in the heart of Belgian hop country, and arriving in late summer meant the bines were heavy with the things, giving the air a faintly bitter, agricultural character that I rather liked. My daughter announced she could smell beer, which was either precocious observation or wishful thinking.

The gentle self-reflection came that evening, once the children were finally asleep and I was sitting with a beer on the small terrace, listening to nothing much at all. I am terrible at doing nothing. My default setting is to plan, to optimise, to turn relaxation into an activity with objectives. But there is something about the flatness of this landscape, the way the horizon simply stretches away without drama or demand, that gradually unties something in your chest. The mishap with the sat nav had cost us forty minutes. In normal life, this would have annoyed me for hours. Here, I could barely remember why it had mattered.

The cottage had board games with missing pieces, a television we never switched on, and a coffee maker that required a degree of negotiation. It was not perfect, and that was precisely the point. Family breaks are not about perfection. They are about surviving the chaos together, about finding amusement in the wonky oven timer and the shower that runs slightly cold, about being in a place where nobody minds if your children are loud at breakfast because the nearest human is across a field of hops.

I sat there long enough to feel slightly chilly, finished my beer, and went inside to find my wife had already fallen asleep on the sofa, book abandoned. I covered her with a blanket from the back of the chair, which smelled of the same wood polish as everything else, and felt briefly, uncomplicatedly content.