I'd left Split airport with that particular swagger you get when you've successfully navigated a foreign car hire desk and emerged with something vaguely resembling a vehicle. The swagger lasted approximately twelve minutes, which is how long it took me to realise I'd been confidently driving north towards Zadar instead of west towards Trogir. My phone, naturally, had been in airplane mode since landing. Classic.

By the time I corrected course and found the old town, the swagger had evaporated entirely. I abandoned the car in the first car park I spotted, grabbed my bag, and trudged through the stone gateway with the hollow-eyed determination of a man who'd missed lunch and was approaching something perilously close to hangry.

Then I smelt it. Grilled fish, garlic, something sharp and herbal drifting from a konoba tucked into a medieval corner. The sort of place where the tables wobble on ancient flagstones and nobody minds because the wine's too good to care. I sat down without checking the menu, which is how I ended up eating brudet, that magnificent Dalmatian fish stew, at half past three in the afternoon. The waiter didn't blink. I suspect they've seen worse from British tourists.

The apartment I'd booked sat just beyond the old town walls, close enough to hear the cathedral bells but mercifully distant from the summer evening crowds. A proper kitchen, the listing had promised, and proper it was. Not one of those holiday let kitchens where you're meant to make toast and feel grateful. This had a decent hob, sharp knives, and a balcony that caught the afternoon sun. I stood there with my coffee the next morning, watching the boats in the marina, and felt that particular shift that happens when a holiday stops being a trip and starts being something you're actually living in.

The market became my morning ritual. Not the tourist stalls selling lavender sachets, but the proper green market by the bus station where local women sold tomatoes that actually tasted of something, bundles of wild asparagus, and octopus that looked at you with an accusatory eye. I bought olive oil from a man who filled my bottle from a massive tin and talked at me for ten minutes about his cousin's grove. I understood perhaps one word in eight, but nodded with the enthusiasm of someone who absolutely comprehended every nuance of Croatian olive cultivation.

My first attempt at cooking was, I shall be charitable, ambitious. I'd purchased squid, reasoning that I watched a YouTube video once and how difficult could it be? The answer, delivered through a kitchen filled with smoke and the lingering smell of regret, was very difficult indeed. I ate it anyway, sat on that sunny balcony, chewing with the determination of a man who refuses to waste eight kuna worth of seafood. The local wine helped. The local wine always helps.

By day three I'd settled into something sustainable. Breakfast was burek from a bakery near the north gate, eaten while wandering the waterfront. Lunch became a loose, moveable feast of prsut and cheese from the market, maybe some fresh figs if they looked right. Dinner I alternated between my own increasingly competent efforts, grilled fish becoming my reliable friend, and the konobas I'd started to think of as mine.

There's one place, I won't name it precisely for fear of ruining it, where the owner brings out whatever he's caught that morning and you simply say yes. No menu, no choices, just fish and potatoes and blitva, that lovely Dalmatian chard, and more of that wine that comes in unlabelled bottles and disappears faster than it ought to.

I attempted peka one evening, that slow-cooked meat and vegetable dish, after befriending a man at the market who agreed to prepare it for my apartment's oven. The results were respectable, though I suspect his grandmother would have found it wanting. We ate it together on my balcony, communicating in broken English and enthusiastic gestures, and he left with half my remaining wine and my promise to return.

The pubs, or rather the local bars, became my evening punctuation. Not the cocktail places along the riva with their overpriced Aperol, but the small spots where old men played cards and the beer was cheap and cold. I'd nurse a Karlovacko and watch the harbour lights, thinking about nothing much at all, which felt increasingly like the point.

On my final morning I made one last market visit, bought too much cheese for my flight, and sat with a final coffee watching the same boats I'd watched that first hungry afternoon. The swagger was gone, replaced by something better. A comfortable fullness, I suppose, in every sense that matters.