The trouble with booking a holiday home called something unpronounceable is that you end up standing at Split Airport trying to sound it out to the car hire man like you're doing an impression of a cat being sick. "Makarska?" he'd said, helpful but pitying. "You mean Makarska." Apparently I'd been putting the stress on entirely the wrong syllable for the past six months of excited planning. Still, I had the keys, a dented Fiat Panda, and a sat nav that seemed personally offended by coastal roads.

The drive down the Dalmatian coast is the sort of thing that makes you forget your own name. One minute you're muttering at a lorry full of lemons, the next you're rounding a bend and there's the Adriatic, bluer than anything has a right to be, with islands scattered about like someone dropped a handful of pebbles. I stopped twice for coffee just to compose myself, which is how I discovered that Croatian motorway cafes serve espresso strong enough to wake the dead and possibly their neighbours too.

Finding the place was straightforward enough, though I did manage to reverse into a very dignified olive tree while trying to read the house number. No harm done, except to my dignity and perhaps the tree's opinion of British drivers. The property sat tucked into a hillside above the town, all white walls and terracotta roof, with a garden that looked like someone had spent years convincing plants to grow in exactly the right places. Bougainvillea tumbled over a low wall. A lemon tree stood by the gate looking smug and productive. There was a terrace with a view down to the sea that made me actually say "blimey" out loud, which I don't think I've done since 1987.

I dumped my bags with the theatrical exhaustion of someone who has done almost nothing for several hours and immediately set about doing more of it. The garden became my headquarters. There was a wooden table under a pergola thick with grape vines, still too young for fruit but generous with dappled shade. I spent the first afternoon there with a book I'd been carrying around since March without opening, a bottle of local white wine, and the profound satisfaction of having absolutely nowhere to be.

The thing about a place like this is that it teaches you how to be useless again. At home I am a person who checks emails while boiling an egg. Here I became someone who could watch a gecko on a wall for twenty minutes without feeling the slightest guilt. The garden had different temperatures depending on where you sat - morning sun on the terrace steps, afternoon cool under the vines, evening warmth by the stone barbecue that looked like it had cooked a thousand fish suppers. I moved between them like a very lazy sundial.

I did walk down to Makarska itself once, a pleasant amble through pine-scented paths that brought me out above the harbour. The town was exactly what you want from a Dalmatian spot - a long promenade, ice cream shops doing brisk trade, old men playing chess with the seriousness of international diplomacy. I bought bread and cheese and tomatoes that actually tasted of something, then walked straight back up to my garden kingdom. The beach could wait. The boat trips could wait. The famous Biokovo Nature Park, visible as a dramatic backdrop every time I looked up from my book, could definitely wait.

By day three I had established a rigorous routine of rising late, making coffee in the small kitchen with its blue-painted cupboards, then settling outside with whatever I was barely reading. The book progressed in pages per hour rather than chapters. I napped without meaning to, waking to find the shadows had moved and some considerate bird had been singing the whole time without my noticing. Once I spent an entire morning trying to identify whether the lizard on the terrace was the same one from yesterday or a newcomer. I never reached a conclusion. It didn't matter.

The gentle self-reflection crept up on me, as these things do when you stop moving long enough for thoughts to catch up. I realised I'd been living as though relaxation were something to be earned, a reward for productive behaviour, rather than a condition you could simply choose. The garden didn't care about my output. The lemon tree wasn't keeping score. There was something quietly radical about letting a day pass with no achievement beyond finishing a chapter, eating a peach, and watching the light change over the water.

On my final morning I sat on the terrace steps with my coffee and watched the sun climb over Biokovo, turning the sea from grey to green to that impossible blue. The gecko was back, or perhaps it was the other one. I had not learned to pronounce the house name properly. I had not seen any of the recommended sights within my five-mile radius, though I had waved at them from the terrace. I had, however, remembered how to sit still without checking a clock, and that felt like the holiday's real souvenir.

I left the book behind on purpose, wedged into the terrace table where it might tempt the next guest into similar uselessness. Some things are better shared.