The sat nav gave up on us about three miles outside Makarska, which I took as a sign we were properly on holiday. My wife had printed directions as backup, bless her, but a gust of wind through the open window sent them fluttering into a field of olive trees somewhere near the turnoff for Veliko Brdo. We spent twenty minutes circling the same roundabout twice, me pretending I knew exactly where we were going, the kids in the back asking if we were lost in Croatia forever.

We found the place eventually, halfway up a hillside with the sort of view that makes you forgive every wrong turn. The stone cottage sat among pines and lavender bushes, looking like it had been there since someone first thought, "You know what this slope needs? A terrace." I wrestled our cases out of the boot while my daughter made a beeline for the pool, still in her travel clothes, shrieking about the temperature in a way that suggested she had not inherited my British tolerance for chilly water.

Inside smelled of cedar and clean linen, which I mention because our last self-catering in Devon had smelled of damp dog and regret. The kitchen had proper terracotta tiles, the sort that clatter satisfyingly underfoot and forgive a dropped ice cube. I immediately knocked a glass off the counter while attempting to locate the fridge. It bounced. Croatian glass, apparently, built for people like me.

The terrace became our headquarters that first evening. We sat with bread from the bakery in Makarska's old town, cheese that tasted of actual grass, and tomatoes so red they seemed smug about it. My son spent forty minutes trying to photograph a lizard. My wife opened wine and didn't speak for ten minutes, which in our house means contentment rather than marital disaster.

I had promised myself I would not spend the first day checking work emails. I checked them twice, hiding in the bathroom like a teenager, then felt so ridiculous I deleted the app entirely. The second glass of wine helped with this decision. The third made me philosophical about lizards and their obvious superiority to middle management.

Morning brought proper chaos. The coffee maker had roughly seventeen settings, none labelled in English. I produced something that tasted of burnt almonds and hope. The children discovered the washing machine and immediately filled it with every item they possessed, including swimming costumes still damp from the night before. We ate breakfast on the terrace watching a neighbour tend his grapevines with the focused patience I have never once applied to anything in my life.

By day three I had stopped wearing a watch. This is not like me. I am a man who arrives early to airports and feels personally offended by delayed trains. Yet something about the rhythm up here, the way the afternoon heat slows everything to a crawl, the evening breeze that arrives precisely when you need it, had begun to work on me like a gentle sedative.

The pool became our morning ritual, the local konoba our evening one. We walked the stony paths through the pines, collected figs from a tree the owner had pointed out, and argued good-naturedly about whether we could justify buying olive oil in quantities that would alarm customs. My daughter learned three Croatian words, two of them for ice cream. My son got sunburned on the back of his knees despite every warning, because some lessons must be learned through suffering.

I caught myself one afternoon, floating in the pool with a beer going warm in my hand, thinking that this was enough. Not the view, though it was ridiculous. Not the wine, though it was excellent. Just this: the four of us in one place, unhurried, slightly sun-drunk, temporarily useless in the best possible way. I nearly said something profound aloud, then remembered my family would mock me mercilessly, and kept it to myself.

The sat nav worked fine on the way back down to the airport. I almost missed the wrong turns.