I have never been so pleased to see a sat nav give up on me as I was somewhere between Pula and Medulin, when ours decided that a dirt track through someone's olive grove was definitely the main road. There we were, in a hire car that already smelled faintly of the airport sandwich I'd dropped on the floor, crawling past bewildered goats while my other half insisted we "trust the technology." The technology, it turned out, had never met Istrian country lanes. Twenty minutes of increasingly tense reversing later, we emerged onto actual tarmac with what I can only describe as agricultural levels of mud on the bumpers and a renewed appreciation for paper maps.

The proper approach to our cottage in Medulin was far more civilised. A quiet residential street, gardens thick with lavender and rosemary, and there it sat: a proper little stone house with green shutters and a terrace that immediately made me want to do absolutely nothing for a week. The key was in the lockbox, the door creaked open with that satisfying holiday-home sound, and we stepped into cool tiled rooms that smelled of clean linen and somewhere, faintly, of the sea drifting through open windows.

I am normally terrible at holidays. I make lists. I research day trips. I once scheduled a "relaxing" afternoon in the Lake District and ended up power-walking fourteen miles because there was a waterfall on a map. But something about this place unspooled that compulsion within about ten minutes. Perhaps it was the garden. It was not grand, not designed, just a decent patch of grass with an ancient-looking olive tree throwing shade over a wooden table, and beyond that a low stone wall where you could prop your elbows and watch neighbourhood cats conduct their important business in the lane below.

We brought the bags in eventually. I am not saying we unpacked with any urgency. There was a hammock. There were two sun loungers positioned at mathematically perfect angles for afternoon napping. I had brought three books, which suddenly seemed like the most brilliant decision I had ever made, and possibly insufficient. My other half disappeared into the kitchen and emerged with two cold beers, and we sat on that terrace as the afternoon turned golden and talked about whether we could be bothered to walk to the shop for dinner supplies. We could not. We found pasta and a jar of something tomato-based in a cupboard and called it rustic improvisation.

The days that followed established a rhythm so lazy it barely qualified as rhythm. Morning coffee on the terrace, watching the garden come alive with insects and the occasional bold sparrow. A slow wander to the bakery for still-warm bread, which we would tear apart with our hands like absolute animals because cutlery felt like unnecessary effort. Then the serious business of doing nothing: the hammock with a book, the sun lounger with eyes closed, the occasional relocation to the patch of grass when the shade moved. I read an entire novel in two days, something that had not happened since I was fifteen and had glandular fever.

The garden became our world. We noticed things. How the olive tree's leaves turned silver when the wind came from the sea. The precise moment in late afternoon when the stone wall became warm enough to lean against comfortably. Where the best patch of shade migrated hour by hour. It was, I realised somewhere around day four, the most present I had been in months. Possibly years. My phone stayed in a drawer. My list-making brain went quiet, outmanoeuvred by sunshine and the simple pleasure of watching clouds do their slow, pointless drift across a blue sky.

We did walk to the sea once or twice, Medulin's gentle coastline being close enough that even our laziness could not entirely resist it. The water was that particular Adriatic clarity, and swimming felt less like exercise and more like floating in a very large, very beautiful bath. But we always came back to the cottage with relief, to our garden and our nothing-much, to bread and tomatoes and cold wine as the evening cooled.

On our last morning, I woke early and sat outside with coffee, watching the olive tree catch the first light. I thought about all the holidays I had rushed through, ticking boxes, seeing sights, returning home somehow more tired than when I left. This had been different. This had been a holiday from doing itself, and I was not sure I had known I needed it until it happened. The sat nav had tried to take us the wrong way, and somehow we had ended up exactly where we needed to be.