The satnav had been promising us "arrival in five minutes" for the best part of half an hour when my wife finally spotted the sign for Ploudalmezeau, and I promptly missed the turning. This set the tone rather nicely for the whole trip, really. We ended up down a lane so narrow that the brambles were practically holding hands across the roof of the car, and I had to reverse three hundred yards past a very judgmental-looking donkey to get back to civilisation.

When we finally found the right lane, the cottage revealed itself gradually, which is the polite way of saying I couldn't work out where to park. The gravel crunch under the tyres was deeply satisfying though, and the children had already flung themselves out of the car before I'd even found the handbrake. My daughter immediately announced she needed the loo, my son had spotted a football in the garden, and my wife was staring at the key safe with the particular expression she reserves for my technological incompetence. I assured her I'd memorised the code. I had not memorised the code. It was on my phone, which was in the car, which I'd already locked. The donkey would have been proud.

Twenty minutes later, once we'd established that the key safe and I were not natural enemies after all, we stepped inside. The smell hit first, that particular blend of old stone and wood polish that makes you feel instantly like you've borrowed someone else's very comfortable life. The kitchen was one of those gloriously impractical French affairs with more cupboards than a village hall and a fridge that hummed with the dedication of a cathedral choir. I opened it to find a welcome bottle of cider, which felt like a reward for my earlier suffering, and a note in careful English warning us about the septic tank. Romance and reality, perfectly balanced.

The children thundered upstairs to claim bedrooms, and I mean thundered. The wooden stairs creaked and groaned with every step, a built-in parental surveillance system that would prove invaluable over the coming days. I followed more slowly, clutching my cider, and found myself in the main bedroom with its sloped ceiling and window that looked out over nothing but fields and sky. I stood there like a proper fool, suddenly aware of how tightly I'd been holding my shoulders since leaving Portsmouth. The ferry felt like weeks ago rather than hours. The queue for coffee, the frantic dash for the toilets at Roscoff, my stubborn refusal to stop at that perfectly decent hypermarket because I was convinced we were "nearly there." All of it dissolved into that view of green and grey and distant sea.

Downstairs, my wife had already unpacked half the kitchen and was muttering about the lack of a proper kettle. The French, bless them, still believe in those stove-top affairs that take roughly the length of a birthday to boil. She caught my eye and we both laughed, that particular married-person laugh that acknowledges accumulated minor disappointments without actually minding them. The children were already filthy, having discovered a muddy patch behind the shed that they insisted was a football pitch. It was not a football pitch. It was barely even a patch.

By evening, we'd established our positions. My wife commandeered the kitchen for a simple pasta supper, the children set up defensive positions around a board game with rules nobody fully understood, and I took my cider outside to watch the light change over the fields. The air smelled of salt and cut grass and something else I couldn't name, something that made me want to do very little for several days. A tractor rumbled past in the distance, and somewhere a dog barked with the half-hearted enthusiasm of a creature that has never been particularly stressed about anything.

I thought about taking a photograph for my brother, who was spending his week off tiling his bathroom. I decided against it. Some things feel more precious for not being shared immediately, and anyway, my phone was still in the car.