I have never been so relieved to see a set of house keys in a plastic box in my entire life. After a three-hour flight to Split, a surprisingly fraught encounter with a car hire desk, and a sat nav that seemed determined to route us through every olive grove in Central Dalmatia, we finally pulled up at our Split Podstrana holiday home. That is when I discovered I had left the key safe code on the kitchen table in Manchester. Cue twenty minutes of me pacing up and down the driveway, phone in hand, trying to coax a signal out of the local network while my wife gave me that particular look she has perfected over fifteen years of marriage. The children, naturally, thought it was the funniest thing they had ever witnessed and made a game of counting how many times I muttered "unbelievable" under my breath.

The property itself, when we finally breached its defences, was an absolute corker. Set on a hillside above Podstrana, it had that wonderful sort of rustic Croatian charm that makes you immediately forgive the slightly wonky wardrobe door and the kitchen drawer that requires a specific jiggle to open. The stone walls were thick enough to survive any argument, which I suspected might prove useful given our key code debacle. The terrace, with its view down toward the Adriatic, became our immediate headquarters. My wife unpacked with military precision while I made the essential first cup of tea and promptly spilled it trying to photograph the sunset. Some things do not change, regardless of postcode.

The children vanished into the garden, which sloped down toward a small olive grove, and reappeared twenty minutes later with a collection of stones they insisted were ancient Roman artefacts. Podstrana sits on the old Roman road from Salona, so I suppose it was not entirely impossible, though I suspect the locals would have noticed if their heritage was being carted off by two overexcited British kids. We spent the first evening doing very little indeed, which was precisely the point. A simple supper of bread, cheese and tomatoes from the little konoba down the lane, eaten outside as the light faded. The sort of meal that reminds you how overcomplicated you have made your normal existence.

What struck me most about those first hours was the particular quality of the quiet. Not silence exactly, because there were crickets and distant voices and the occasional scooter puttering up the hillside road. Rather a kind of spaciousness, an absence of the usual mental clutter. I found myself sitting on that terrace long after everyone else had gone to bed, nursing a glass of local wine and feeling slightly embarrassed by how much I needed this. The constant low-level anxiety of modern life, the endless administrative noise, it all seemed to have been left behind at Manchester Airport along with, apparently, my organisational skills.

The next morning I woke to my son standing beside the bed asking if Croatia had different rules about breakfast cereal. He had poured himself a bowl of what he thought was cornflakes but turned out to be some sort of grain the previous guests had left in an unmarked jar. We had a good laugh about that over proper coffee on the terrace, watching the early swimmers already down on the pebble beach below. I decided then that I would not spend this holiday being the sort of person who worries about key codes or unmarked jars or whether the hire car had enough petrol. I would be the sort of person who jiggles kitchen drawers with good humour and accepts that ancient Roman stones belong in small boys' pockets. The sort of person, in other words, that this relaxed family break in Podstrana seemed determined to help me become.