The sat nav had been insisting we were three minutes from our Porec Stranici villa for the better part of twenty minutes, which in hindsight should have been my first clue that Istrian country lanes do not yield to technology. We had already reversed past one startled goat and what I am fairly certain was someone's entire olive harvest drying on a tarpaulin when my partner announced, with the confidence of a man who had not been driving, that we had definitely missed the turning. We had not missed the turning. The turning had simply ceased to exist, swallowed by vegetation that looked like it had been plotting conquest since the Habsburg era. By the time we finally spotted the stone wall and wooden gate that marked our destination, I had developed a twitch in my left eye and a profound respect for anyone who navigated this region before Google Maps.

I stumbled out of the car into a silence so complete it felt almost theatrical. No traffic hum, no distant aeroplanes, just the particular stillness of an Istrian afternoon in late September and the faint buzz of something insect-related that I chose to interpret as welcoming rather than threatening. The villa sat there looking thoroughly pleased with itself, all honey-coloured stone and terracotta roof tiles, surrounded by a garden that seemed to have achieved perfection through sheer neglect. Wild rosemary bushes sprawled across gravel paths. A fig tree dropped fruit onto a weathered wooden table with the lazy regularity of a grandfather clock. Somewhere in the undergrowth, a tortoise was doing something important at a speed that suggested it had nowhere particular to be.

The owner had left a bottle of local Malvazija in the fridge and a handwritten note advising us that the outdoor shower was "very romantic" and also "sometimes visited by hedgehogs." I decided this summed up the entire Istrian experience rather neatly.

Our first morning, I woke with the unfamiliar sensation of having slept through the night without once contemplating work emails or the structural integrity of our kitchen plumbing back home. The coffee machine made satisfyingly industrial noises while I carried a mug outside and established myself in what I immediately designated my official position: a slightly sagging wicker chair positioned to catch the morning sun without surrendering entirely to it. From here I could observe the garden's slow performance, which today featured a lizard conducting what appeared to be a military inspection of the stone wall and a neighbour's cat pretending it had never seen a human before in its life.

I had brought three books with the optimistic intention of "getting through them," a phrase that now seemed aggressively American in its productivity. By day four I had read seventeen pages of the first one and could not have been more content. The narrative had become pleasantly optional, something that happened between watching grapes slowly darken on the vine opposite my chair and wondering whether it was too early for the first swim. It never was too early. The pool, fed by something that kept it at the temperature of a particularly indulgent bath, received my unhurried attentions at least twice daily. I developed an elaborate routine of entry that involved prolonged dangling of legs, contemplative gazing at the surrounding cypress trees, and eventual immersion with the ceremony of a Victorian gentleman testing sea bathing for the first time.

My partner, possessed of marginally more ambition, occasionally cycled to the nearby village for bread and returned with elaborate reports of having seen "an extremely old man" and "possibly another tortoise, or the same one." These expeditions, lasting perhaps forty minutes, were treated with the gravity of polar exploration. We compared notes over lunch at the garden table, a procession of simple things that tasted of having required no effort: tomatoes that actually tasted of tomatoes, cheese from a farm we never visited, bread that demanded serious chewing.

The afternoon unfolded with the inevitability of a tide coming in. I would read another paragraph, perhaps two. I would definitely doze, waking with the particular confusion of someone who has lost track of whether it is Tuesday or simply "the day after the good bread." The fig tree continued its campaign of gentle bombardment. I began to understand, with the slow clarity that comes from genuine rest, that my ordinary life had become accidentally structured around the assumption that doing nothing was a failure rather than, occasionally, an achievement worth pursuing deliberately.

On our final evening, I sat in that same wicker chair watching the light change over the olive trees and realised I had spent seven days in Istria without seeing a single tourist attraction, taking any photographs worth sharing, or accomplishing anything that would register as productive. The sat nav had failed us, the hedgehog had indeed visited the outdoor shower, and I had never once finished my coffee while it was still properly hot. It was absolutely perfect.