I have never been brilliant at following satnav instructions, and my arrival in Makarska proved this beyond doubt. Somewhere around Split I decided the coastal road looked "more scenic," which is how I ended up on a single-track lane behind a donkey whose owner seemed in no particular hurry. Three hairpins later, I was staring at a goat that appeared to be judging my life choices. By the time I found the holiday home, I had sweated through my shirt, developed an irrational fear of Croatian livestock, and forgotten which bag contained my swimming trunks.

The property sat tucked among olive trees and hibiscus, a low stone building with terracotta roof tiles that looked exactly like the photographs except somehow more tired, more real, more welcoming. I dumped the car, still muttering about donkeys, and pushed open the garden gate. That first moment stopped me properly. The garden was not manicured, not in that desperate English way, but loosely arranged, generous, slightly wild. Lemon trees in terracotta pots. A pergola draped with grapevines that cast dappled shade across a wooden table. Somewhere invisible, a sprinkler hissed and ticked. I stood there with my ridiculous wheelie case and felt something unclench in my chest that I had not realised was clenched.

The key was where promised, under a stone frog that was itself quite alarmingly realistic. Inside, the house smelled of pine cleaner and something else, something warm and closed-up, the particular scent of a place waiting to be lived in again. I did not immediately explore. I found the nearest chair, a wicker thing with faded cushions, dragged it onto the terrace, and sat. Just sat. A gecko darted across the wall. A bee investigated my abandoned car keys. The afternoon heat pressed down like a gentle hand, and I understood with embarrassing clarity that I had forgotten how to do this. How to arrive somewhere and simply be arrived.

I had packed four books with the optimistic intention of "getting through them." This now seems hilarious. I managed perhaps six pages that first afternoon before dozing off, the paperback sliding onto the warm stone with a soft slap. I woke to find the light had shifted, the shadows lengthened, and my left arm had acquired an impressive stripe of pink through some gap in the vine cover. The garden had continued its business without me. A cat, not mine, had curled on the neighbouring chair and regarded me with the flat patience of animals everywhere.

The kitchen was basic, which suited me. I made terrible coffee with the stovetop pot and drank it on the terrace watching nothing in particular. The neighbour's television murmured through the hedge. A scooter buzzed somewhere distant, then closer, then gone. This became my rhythm. Mornings I would shuffle out in whatever I had slept in, water the potted herbs that the owners had left with a handwritten note, then retreat to my chair with toast and another abandoned book. The garden demanded nothing. It offered shade, the occasional lemon that dropped with a soft thud, the company of that same cat who began to expect a saucer of milk.

I had intended to walk to Makarska's old town, perhaps three kilometres down the coast road. I managed this precisely once, on day four, and returned with a sun hat I did not need and a strong conviction that the garden was superior. The town was pleasant enough, the harbour pretty, the ice cream adequate. But the walking, the choosing, the being somewhere with purpose, it all felt slightly performative. The garden asked nothing of me. I could read the same paragraph seventeen times. I could watch ants navigate the table leg for twenty minutes. I could fall asleep mid-thought and wake with a crick in my neck and absolutely no ambition to fix it.

On my final morning I sat with my terrible coffee and watched the grapevines move slightly in a breeze I could not feel. The cat had brought a friend, equally indifferent to my departure. I thought about the emails waiting, the train to catch, the life that would resume its usual velocity. I thought too about the donkey, now fondly, about the wrong turn that had delivered me here, about how often my best moments arrived through minor disaster. The garden would continue. The lemons would drop. Someone else would sit in my chair and learn, or not learn, whatever they needed. I finished my coffee slowly, deliberately, the last lazy act of a week that had taught me the radical pleasure of doing almost nothing at all, and doing it somewhere beautiful.