The Sat-Nav had been promising me a "scenic route" through Picardy for the better part of three hours, which I now realise is French technology-speak for "prepare to become intimately acquainted with every tractor in northern France." By the time I spotted the sign for Roisel, I'd already reversed into a hedge trying to let a combine harvester pass, spent twenty minutes circling what I swore was the same roundabout, and developed a deeply personal vendetta against a woman called Sylvie who apparently owned the only bakery in a fifteen-mile radius but had chosen today to close early.

I found the cottage down a lane so narrow I had to fold in the wing mirrors and hold my breath. The key was exactly where the email said: a rusted metal box behind a watering can that looked older than my grandmother. What the email had neglected to mention was that the box had a wasp nest in it. Not an active one, thank Christ, but enough papery remnants to make me drop the keys twice and perform a small dance that I'm certain the neighbouring farmer will remember at his deathbed.

The door stuck. Of course it stuck. I put my shoulder into it like they do in films, which achieved nothing except a bruise and the realisation that I needed to pull, not push. The handle came off in my hand. I stood there, holding it, wondering if this was the moment I simply turned around and drove back to Calais.

Then I stepped inside.

The place smelled of woodsmoke and lavender, that particular combination that makes you forgive almost anything. Beams ran across the ceiling at angles that suggested they'd been installed before anyone had invented the spirit level. The kitchen had a proper range cooker, the sort my mother always claimed she wanted before remembering she couldn't actually cook. Someone, presumably the owners, had left a bottle of local cider on the table with a note wishing me "bon sejour" in handwriting that looped and swirled like the roads I'd just survived.

I dumped my bags in what I assumed was the main bedroom, though "main" suggested a hierarchy that didn't really exist in a house with three similarly uneven floors. The window looked out over fields that rolled away in proper chocolate-box fashion, all golden stubble and distant tree lines. A crow landed on the fence post and regarded me with what I can only describe as professional scepticism. Fair enough, I thought. I was still holding the door handle.

The bathroom took some finding, tucked behind a cupboard door that looked like it led to a broom closet. The showerhead was one of those European ones you have to hold, which I always forget until I'm standing there shivering and performing an awkward one-man water ballet. But the water ran hot and the tiles were that faded blue you see in French films, and someone had left a sliver of proper soap that smelled of something herbal and expensive.

By evening I'd managed to jam the door handle back on, more or less. I'd also discovered that the cottage's WiFi password was written on the underside of a ceramic frog by the sink, that the nearest shop was a twenty-minute drive I'd definitely repeat tomorrow, and that the silence here wasn't empty but full - full of distant tractors, of church bells I couldn't locate, of something that might have been an owl or might have been my imagination finally stretching its legs after too long in cities.

I sat on the wonky wooden chair outside with my questionable cider and watched the light fade across those impossible fields. My shoulder ached. My dignity hadn't survived the wasp box incident. The door handle would probably fall off again by morning.

I couldn't remember the last time I'd felt so immediately, stupidly happy to be exactly where I was.