I have never been so pleased to see a satellite dish in my life. After six hours of travel, two wrong turns, and one spectacular argument with a hire car sat nav that insisted Pridraga was "in the sea, turn around," I finally spotted the little white house with its terracotta roof and that blessed dish pointing skyward. I was, against all technological odds, in the right place.

The mishap came immediately. I flung open the car door, stretched my legs with theatrical relief, and promptly tripped over a watering can that had been minding its own business by the garden path. Water everywhere. My dignity, what remained of it, soaked into the Croatian dust. A neighbour peered over the wall, offered a sympathetic nod, and went back to his business. I suspect this is not the first time a weary Brit has arrived here in disarray.

The key was in the lockbox, which I fumbled with for longer than I care to admit. But then the door swung open, and the cool interior swallowed me whole. The house was simple, unpretentious, exactly as it had looked in the photographs but somehow more forgiving in person. The tiled floors were pleasantly cold beneath my feet. The kitchen window framed a view of olive trees that made me exhale properly for the first time in months.

I dumped my suitcase in the bedroom without unpacking, which is not like me at all. I am usually the sort who hangs shirts within seventeen minutes of arrival. Instead, I found myself drawn to the garden, that modest patch of green with its wooden table and chairs positioned with evident care beneath a pergola. Someone had thought about where the shade would fall at different hours. I approved of this person immediately.

The afternoon dissolved into nothing much at all. I sat with a book I had been carrying unread for two years, read three pages, and fell asleep in the chair. The neighbour's dog barked once, half-heartedly, then apparently also lost interest. A gecko observed me from the wall with the patient contempt only lizards can manage. I woke with a crick in my neck and the profound satisfaction of having achieved absolutely nothing since arrival.

This became the pattern. Mornings began slowly, coffee on the terrace watching the light change over the garden. The house had no particular hurry about it. I would wander to the small shop in the village for bread and tomatoes, exchange pleasantries in my dreadful phrasebook Croatian, and retreat to my shady kingdom. The tomatoes were absurdly good, incidentally. Sun-warmed, misshapen, nothing like the uniform red globes of home. I ate them with salt and olive oil and considered this a complete meal.

I brought three books and finished none of them. This felt like progress of a kind. The garden demanded little attention beyond my presence. I watched ants navigate the terrace cracks with more focus than I had given anything at work in years. One afternoon I simply counted the different birds I could hear. I reached seven before admitting I could not identify a single one with confidence.

There is something humbling about deliberately slowing down. I am not good at it by nature. I like lists, achievements, the tick of boxes. But Pridraga wore me down gently, like water on stone. By the fourth day, I had stopped checking my watch entirely. I could not have told you the date without serious thought.

The evenings were warm and long. I cooked simple things badly and ate them well. The satellite dish, my original beacon, provided nothing I wanted to watch. I never turned the television on. The garden darkened slowly, the geckos emerged, and I sat with my lukewarm drink feeling something like peace settle over me.

I arrived chaotic and left, I hope, slightly less so. The watering can remained by the path, undisturbed after our first encounter. I like to think it understood.