We had been on the road for what felt like seventeen hours but was probably closer to four when I realised I had packed every book I owned, three chargers, and a jar of Marmite, but not a single pair of proper shoes. Just flip-flops and one battered trainer whose mate had mysteriously vanished somewhere between the M25 and the Eurotunnel. My partner gave me that look, the one that says "I love you but honestly," and I spent the rest of the drive through Slovenia practising my defence speech about minimalist footwear philosophy.

The approach to Porec Tar did not help my case. The Istrian countryside rolls along in that unfairly photogenic way, all cypress trees and red-tiled roofs and vines that look like they have been arranged by a particularly meticulous film set designer. Our hire car, a Fiat so small my knees were practically steering, bumped down a gravel track lined with oleander bushes. I was still wearing my single trainer, having developed a limp I told myself looked rakish.

The cottage sat at the end of a modest garden, cream walls and green shutters, with a terrace that immediately announced its intentions. Two sun loungers. A parasol with a slight lean to it, like a drunk uncle at a wedding. A barbecue that had seen things. I dropped my bag on the threshold and felt something shift in my chest, some tight coil that had been winding since Gatwick finally deciding to unspool.

The mishap, because there is always a mishap, came when I attempted to be helpful. "I'll get the shopping in," I announced, brandishing the single key. The front door has one of those locks that requires a specific combination of prayer, force, and exactly the right angle. I turned it left, then right, then left again with increasing violence. Nothing. The afternoon sun was doing that thing where it becomes personally offended by your incompetence. Sweat gathered. My partner watched from the car, windows up, air conditioning running, expression unreadable.

Fifteen minutes. I am not exaggerating. I tried the back door, a window, considered whether I could fit through the cat flap if there had been a cat flap. Eventually I discovered the key turned clockwise only after you lifted the handle slightly, a piece of information that existed nowhere in the welcome pack and that I suspect previous guests have taken to their graves out of sheer embarrassment. I stood in the kitchen, triumphant and dripping, holding a bag of Croatian biscuits I had already crushed through sheer key-related stress.

But here is the thing. That first evening, once the door had been conquered and the wine opened, we did almost nothing. The garden had a fig tree heavy with fruit nobody seemed in a hurry to harvest. I sat under it in my flip-flops, my one trainer abandoned in the hall as a sort of memorial to my earlier self. Swallows cut across the sky. Somewhere a neighbour was cooking something with garlic that made our supermarket haul feel inadequate.

The days that followed established a rhythm so lazy it barely qualified as rhythm. Morning coffee on the terrace, watching geckos dart across the warm walls. A walk to the village shop for bread that went stale in the proper way, not the supermarket way. Afternoons with books I had actually brought, not the ones I imagined reading, lying on those slightly angled loungers until the sun moved around and demanded relocation.

I finished a novel I had carried through three previous holidays. I watched a spider construct something ambitious between two lavender bushes. I learned that figs taste different when you pick them slightly overripe and eat them standing in grass that needs cutting, juice running down your wrist, nowhere to be and no shoes required.

The garden became the world. A small stone table where lunch stretched to two hours. The barbecue, once I stopped being intimidated by it, produced fish that looked terrible and tasted perfect. Evenings brought that particular Istrian quality of light, honeyed and slow, the kind that makes you understand why people paint.

I thought about my trainer in the hall, the other one probably enjoying itself somewhere on the A26 autoroute. I thought about how much energy I usually spend being somewhere, doing something, proving some point to myself about productivity or experience or whatever nonsense I have absorbed about what holidays should accomplish.

On our last morning I found a second key in the kitchen drawer, clearly labelled with instructions. I stood there in my flip-flops, holding it, laughing in that way that is mostly just breathing out. Some lessons you learn the hard way. Some you do not learn at all, and perhaps that is fine too.