I'd never been to Pag before, and if I'm honest, I hadn't the foggiest where Kvarner Bay even was until about three weeks before we left. My other half sorted the whole thing, breezily announcing we'd be staying in a "lovely little stone cottage with a garden." Sounded idyllic. What she failed to mention was that getting there would involve a ferry, a sat nav with a nervous breakdown, and me spectacularly misjudging the width of our hire car.

The mishap came approximately forty minutes after we rolled off the ferry at Zigljen. Narrow road, stone wall on one side, impatient local in a battered Citroen behind me, and a sudden conviction that I could squeeze past a parked scooter. I could not. The scrape of wing mirror against ancient Dalmatian masonry still haunts me. The local sighed, overtook with theatrical slowness, and my other half developed a sudden fascination with her phone. We drove the remaining ten minutes in silence broken only by my occasional muttering about "bloody Mediterranean driving."

The cottage itself redeemed everything. We found it down a dusty track, past olive groves that looked older than my grandmother, and there it sat: proper thick stone walls, wooden shutters, a garden that had clearly been loved by someone with more patience than I'll ever possess. Lavender everywhere, a fig tree dropping fruit we were too slow to collect before the wasps claimed it, and a terrace with a wobbly table that became my headquarters for the week.

I cannot overstate how little we did. This was the point, I eventually realised. The first morning I woke at half six from habit, made coffee in the tiny kitchen with its slightly wonky kettle, and sat outside in dewy quiet until the sun cleared the hill. I finished a book I'd been carrying around since March. I started another and abandoned it after thirty pages because it demanded too much thinking. The garden had a hammock strung between two trees, positioned with mathematical precision for afternoon shade, and I perfected the art of getting into it without tipping myself onto the grass. Took three days.

We walked to the nearest village once, maybe twice. Bought cheese, some of that famous Pag lamb we'd read about, bread that went stale properly instead of turning weirdly plastic. Otherwise we existed in a small orbit: kitchen to terrace to hammock to the slightly uncomfortable sun lounger that I grew perversely fond of. The fig tree dropped more fruit. I watched a lizard establish territory on the garden wall and felt genuinely invested in his success.

My other half read three books and developed a tan that made her smug. I mostly forgot what day it was, which felt like the actual achievement. There was a moment, perhaps Wednesday, perhaps Thursday, when I realised I hadn't checked my phone in something like fourteen hours. Panic, then relief, then a peculiar pride. The cottage didn't have fancy anything, really. The shower ran either scalding or freezing with no reliable middle ground. The WiFi worked best from one specific corner of the terrace if you held your phone just so. None of it mattered because the garden existed in that particular quality of light that makes doing nothing feel like legitimate activity.

I thought about that wing mirror scrape on our last evening, wine in hand, watching the sun do its slow descent behind the hills. I'd been so wound up, so convinced the holiday was tainted. Instead it became a funny story I told myself while waiting for the kettle, a marker of arrival before the real arrival happened. The slowing down took effort at first, like learning to breathe differently. Then it didn't.

We left the fig tree to its wasps, the lizard to his wall, the hammock swaying slightly in morning breeze. I drove to the ferry more carefully this time. The mirror still wobbled where I'd taped it. I didn't mind at all.