I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I tried to fill up our hire car with petrol and realised, three litres in, that I was pumping diesel into an unleaded tank. The forecourt attendant in Pula looked at me with the kind of weary sympathy usually reserved for small children and drunk people. Forty minutes, one tow truck, and a hefty chunk of our food budget later, we finally crawled into Banjole just as the sun was doing that lovely golden thing over the Adriatic.

Our villa sat tucked down a narrow lane, all cream stone and terracotta roof tiles, with a pool that caught the last light like someone had spilled a pint of lager on a polished bar. I stood there with our bags, smelling olive trees and wood smoke and something garlicky drifting from a neighbouring garden, and felt the particular shame of a man who has nearly ruined a holiday before it has begun. My partner gave me that look. You know the one. The "you're cooking every meal this week" look.

Banjole itself turned out to be a proper little fishing village, the sort where old blokes in faded shirts mend nets at dawn and the harbour smells honestly of fish rather than tourist-trap perfume. Our first morning, I shuffled down to the waterfront still jet-lagged and sheepish, and found a konoba where the owner was already grilling sardines over charcoal. I ate them with my fingers, tearing soft bread through pools of olive oil, watching the boats bob about like they had nowhere particular to be. The coffee was thick and bitter and exactly right.

The local market in Pula became our morning ritual, though I use "ritual" loosely given my first attempt at buying prsut. I pointed confidently at what I thought was the good stuff, only to discover I'd purchased something the vendor later explained was "for flavouring soups, mostly." It was essentially a bone with ambition. My partner laughed so hard she nearly dropped her figs. I took it back to the villa and stubbornly simmered it into a respectable broth, adding white beans and kale from a stall run by a woman who called me "my English" and kept giving me extra garlic because she could tell, she said, that I needed help.

The villa kitchen was one of those generous Mediterranean spaces with terracotta floors and a proper gas hob that roared like a dragon when you lit it. I took this as a challenge. One evening I attempted a proper Istrian stew, fumbling with fresh borlotti beans and a piece of beef the butcher had cut with theatrical precision. I may have had too much of the local Teran while cooking. The result was edible, technically, though my partner suggested the carrots had achieved a texture previously unknown to science. We ate it on the terrace with more wine, watching bats dart above the pool, and I decided that culinary perfection was overrated compared to the pleasure of slow evenings with nowhere to be.

The village pub, if you can call it that, was really a family-run place near the harbour where the beer was cold and the conversation moved between Italian, Croatian, and gestures. I became oddly attached to their simple plates of anchovies and pickled vegetables, the kind of food that makes you realise how much British pub snacks have strayed from their purpose. The owner's son taught me the word for "delicious" in Croatian, which I promptly forgot after two glasses of rakija, though I remember the warmth of his amusement.

By our fourth day, I had established a comfortable rhythm. Morning market, where I no longer pointed randomly but asked questions with my limited phrasebook and abundant hand gestures. Afternoon cooking attempts that gradually improved, or at least became more confidently mediocre. Evening meals that stretched for hours, fuelled by wine and the particular laziness of holiday time.

My finest moment came with a simple pasta dish, handmade fuzi from the market tossed with truffle paste and butter. It took ten minutes, cost almost nothing, and my partner actually paused mid-bite to acknowledge that I had, finally, not ruined something. I may have teared up slightly. The truffle, earthy and ridiculous, tasted of the Istrian hills we'd driven through, of mist and dogs and farmers who keep secrets.

On our last morning, I stood again by the harbour, eating another plate of those sardines, watching the same old blokes doing the same patient work with their nets. I thought about our diesel disaster, my soup bone humiliation, the carrots of questionable texture. The whole week had been a lesson in lowering expectations and finding better things in their place. Not perfection, but presence. Not expertise, but willingness to try, to fail, to try again with more garlic and better wine.

The sardine crunched pleasantly between my teeth. Somewhere behind me, my partner was laughing at something, probably me. I decided not to ask.