I have never been so relieved to see a washing machine in my life, and that is not a sentence I expected to write about a holiday in Dalmatia.

The trouble began at Split Airport, which I had confidently assured my partner was "tiny, barely a shed, we'll be out in ten minutes." Two hours later, having been herded through passport control by a man who looked like he had personally witnessed the fall of Yugoslavia, we finally collected our hire car. A Fiat so compact that I genuinely believed they had brought us a child's toy by mistake. I folded myself into the driver's seat like a travel cot, knees around my ears, and promptly scraped the bumper on a concrete pillar that materialised from nowhere. My partner said nothing. She has that gift.

The drive to Seget Donji should take twenty minutes. It took us fifty-five, thanks to my stubborn refusal to trust the sat nav and my subsequent conviction that I knew a shortcut through Trogir's medieval streets. I did not know a shortcut. I knew, briefly, the intimate dimensions of a street designed for donkeys, and the furious face of a man selling dried figs whose stall I nearly collected as a bonnet ornament. We reversed for three hundred metres while he gestured in a manner that suggested he had cursed several generations of my family.

By the time we reached the property, I had sweated through my shirt twice and developed a twitch in my left eye that remains with me to this day. The villa sat behind a modest wall, all cream stone and terracotta roof tiles, utterly indifferent to my suffering. I fumbled with the key safe, dropped the code, dropped the keys, and finally kicked the front door open with more force than necessary. It swung inward to reveal a kitchen so clean it looked staged, which of course it was, and I immediately felt like a vandal intruding upon a magazine shoot.

My partner walked straight past me to the terrace, and I heard her laugh. Not the polite laugh she saves for my jokes, but something genuine. I followed her out to find the Adriatic laid out like a promise, that particular blue that makes you suspicious of photographs until you see it yourself. The terrace had a grill that looked barely used, which I took as a personal challenge, and loungers positioned with mathematical precision to catch the afternoon sun. I lowered myself onto one with the caution of a man who had recently assaulted a concrete pillar, and felt something in my shoulders actually detach and float away.

The mishap, when it came, was entirely my own fault. Exploring the downstairs bedroom, I discovered the washing machine and decided, with the wisdom of the truly exhausted, that I should immediately wash everything we owned. I poured in what I believed to be detergent from an unmarked bottle by the sink. It was not detergent. The machine erupted fifteen minutes later with a foam situation that would have delighted a children's television presenter and absolutely no one else. I stood in the utility room, ankle-deep in bubbles, listening to my partner shout something about olive oil from the terrace, and understood with perfect clarity that this was my life now.

She was shouting about the olive oil because she had found the actual welcome pack, sensibly located in the kitchen, and had poured us each a glass of something local while I committed chemical warfare on our laundry. I emerged, damp and fragrant in a way I did not appreciate, to find her barefoot with a glass of red, pointing at a gecko on the wall that she had named and presumably planned to adopt.

That first evening, we walked the ten minutes to Seget Donji's small harbour, past low stone houses with shutters painted in faded greens and blues, past an old man who nodded at us as if we were expected, past the smell of pine and salt and something grilling with garlic. We ate grilled fish at a restaurant where the waiter spoke three languages and chose to use none of them, communicating instead through gestures and raised eyebrows. It was perfect. The fish was perfect. My partner's sunburn, which she had not mentioned developing on the terrace, was spectacular.

Walking back in darkness, the path unlit but somehow safe, I carried my shoes and felt the warmth of the stone through my soles. The villa waited for us, lights on in the windows, looking like somewhere we had already begun to belong. I thought about the foam, the fig seller, the Fiat that had somehow become our companion. I thought about how I would remember this, not the smooth holidays but this particular chaos, this specific arrival.

The washing machine, incidentally, never quite recovered. I like to think it forgave me.