I have never been a natural navigator, and my arrival in Gedinne proved it in spectacular fashion. After a perfectly pleasant drive from Calais, my partner and I found ourselves circling the same roundabout near Namur for what felt like twenty minutes, arguing about whether the satnav was broken or whether I had simply entered the postcode with my usual clumsy thumbs. Spoiler: it was both. I had typed a six instead of a five, and the poor device was trying to send us to a field somewhere near Dinant.

By the time we actually reached the holiday home, I was in that peculiar state of frazzled determination where you refuse to admit anything is wrong. The property sat among rolling woodland just outside Gedinne proper, a solid stone building with a steep roof and that satisfyingly Belgian look of having been there since before anyone thought to invent stress. I grabbed our bags with theatrical confidence, marched toward the front door, and promptly tripped over a root that I am convinced was not there a second earlier. My suitcase went one way, my dignity went another, and a family of deer in the neighbouring field looked on with what I can only describe as polite Belgian indifference.

The key was in the lockbox exactly where the instructions said, which would have been comforting had I not spent five minutes trying to open it upside down. My partner watched this performance with the patient expression of someone who has seen it all before. When the door finally yielded, we stepped into a hallway that smelled of wood polish and something else I could not place, something warm and faintly spicy that made me think of my grandmother's kitchen despite her never having set foot in Belgium.

The living room was larger than I expected, with exposed beams and furniture that managed to be rustic without tipping into that self-conscious "look at me, I am rustic" territory. A wood-burning stove squatted in one corner like a promise. I immediately decided we would use it that evening, conveniently forgetting that my fire-lighting skills extend about as far as a damp match and wishful thinking.

The kitchen, though, was where I stood for a proper moment of reflection. It was properly equipped, not one of those holiday rentals where you open a drawer to find a single bent teaspoon and a corkscrew that does not work. There were actual sharp knives, actual pans with actual lids, and a coffee maker that looked like it meant business. I found myself unexpectedly moved by this competence, by the sense that someone had thought about what a person might actually need. It is a strange thing to feel grateful toward a kitchen, but there I was, standing with my still-tripping knees and my upside-down lockbox confidence, feeling oddly at home.

I wandered out to the terrace while my partner investigated the bedrooms. The garden sloped away into trees, and somewhere beyond them I could hear water moving, probably the Lesse river that runs through this part of the Ardennes. The afternoon light was doing that golden thing it does before it gives up, and I sat on a wooden chair that creaked reassuringly beneath me. My phone buzzed with a message from a friend asking how the holiday was going. I looked at the smear of mud on my trouser knee from my earlier performance, thought about the roundabout, the root, the lockbox. "Perfect," I typed back. "Absolutely perfect."

And in its own ridiculous way, it already was.