I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I tried to pay for petrol at Trieste and accidentally offered the cashier my Tesco Clubcard instead of my credit card. She looked at me with the kind of pity usually reserved for people who try to use Monopoly money, and I spent the next twenty minutes of the drive to Medulin convincing myself that nobody speaks English in northern Italy anyway, so my dignity remained intact. Mostly.

The final stretch down through Istria was proper gorgeous, all rolling hills and vineyards that made me feel like I was in some sort of car advert, if car adverts featured a sweating man in a Vauxhall Corsa with a boot full of duty-free gin and a passenger who needed the loo. My other half had insisted we stop at a roadside stall for what he called "authentic local produce" and what turned out to be three kilos of prsut that we somehow had to keep cold for the remaining hour. I spent that hour with my feet resting on a ham leg, which is not something I ever expected to type.

Arriving at the property in Medulin felt like stumbling into someone else's rather lovely life. The place was one of those modern Croatian holiday homes with a terrace that practically demanded an Aperol spritz, which I provided approximately four minutes after unloading the car. The kitchen, I noted with the keen eye of someone who had promised to "cook properly on holiday," was actually decent. Gas hob, good knives, a fridge that looked capable of handling my illicit ham situation. I was already planning.

Our first evening, we walked into Medulin proper, which took about twelve minutes at my pace or eight at his. The seafront was buzzing without being obnoxious, full of families and couples and that particular Mediterranean energy where everyone seems slightly sun-drunk and pleased with themselves. We found a konoba, one of those traditional Istrian taverns, and I proceeded to make a complete pig of myself on manestra, the local bean and ham soup, followed by grilled squid that I am still thinking about weeks later. My partner had the pasticada, which he described as "like beef stew if beef stew had gone on a gap year and come back interesting." The local Malvazija wine was dangerously drinkable, by which I mean I drank rather a lot of it and had to be steered home like a particularly enthusiastic shopping trolley.

The next morning revealed that my three-kilo ham situation had become urgent. We found the local market, a proper working affair with old ladies selling vegetables they had clearly grown themselves and regarded with suspicion if you did not select them with sufficient gravitas. I bought tomatoes that actually tasted of something, which I realise makes me sound like every middle-aged food bore on the internet, but honestly, you would understand if you had tasted them. Some local olive oil, a hunk of cheese that the vendor described simply as "good, very good" with a gesture that brooked no argument. I was going to cook an Istrian feast if it killed me.

It very nearly did. My attempt at fuzi, the traditional hand-rolled pasta, was an unmitigated disaster that I can only describe as looking like something a cat had been sick on. We ended up at a nearby pizzeria where I consoled myself with a wood-fired pizza bianca and the bitter knowledge that some people are born to make pasta and others are born to appreciate those who can. The pizza was exceptional, to be fair, thin and blistered and topped with local asparagus and prsut that was, I had to admit, better than my boot-cooled version.

By day four I had settled into a comfortable rhythm of market mornings, terrace lunches involving very little cooking on my part, and evenings exploring the various eating establishments within walking distance. There was a seafood restaurant near the marina where we ate buzara, mussels in wine and garlic, and I got into an extended conversation with the waiter about English football that I was spectacularly unqualified to have. Another konoba where the owner brought us grappa "on the house" and I made the rookie error of actually drinking it, spending the walk home convinced I could taste colours.

I did manage one successful meal at the property, a simple grilled fish with market vegetables and a dressing of that assertive olive oil. We ate it on the terrace as the sun went down, and I felt briefly like the sort of person who has their life together, who buys fresh fish and knows what to do with it. The feeling lasted until I tried to clean the grill pan and discovered I had no idea where the bin bags were.

On our last morning, we walked to a bakery for burek, that flaky pastry filled with cheese that manages to be simultaneously breakfast and a religious experience. I ate mine on a bench overlooking the water, watching the early boats and thinking about how I would definitely learn to make pasta properly when I got home, how I would seek out proper tomatoes, how I would recreate this feeling of being pleasantly full in a foreign place with nothing urgent to do.

I have not learned to make pasta. I have, however, found a deli near me that sells Croatian olive oil at an offensive markup, and I consider this a reasonable compromise. Some holidays change you profoundly. Others simply remind you that you are a person who is better at eating than cooking, and that there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.