The sat nav had been promising we'd arrive in twenty minutes for the best part of an hour, which I suppose should have been my first warning. We had been winding through the lanes of Poitou-Charentes since midday, past sunflower fields that looked almost aggressively cheerful given my mood, and I was beginning to suspect our digital friend had developed a personal vendetta against us.

The mishap, when it came, was almost impressively stupid. I had stopped to photograph a particularly handsome donkey by the roadside, because apparently that is who I am now, and in my enthusiasm I managed to leave the car keys sitting on the roof. We discovered this twelve minutes later when we pulled up to the gates of Lencloitre and I went to grab my bag. The keys were nowhere. A brief, increasingly frantic search of every pocket, bag, and crevice later, I had to accept the humiliating truth. I retraced our route on foot, sweating profusely in the September heat, until I found them gleaming in a ditch about half a mile back. The donkey, I noted, had not moved. He looked at me with what I can only describe as justified contempt.

By the time I trudged back to the property, my partner had already introduced herself to the owners and was sipping something cold on the terrace. She raised an eyebrow in that particular way that manages to convey affection, exhaustion, and mild despair all at once. I waved weakly and tried to look like a man who definitely had everything under control.

But here is the thing about first impressions: they can turn on you. I had arrived at Lencloitre hot, embarrassed, and faintly smelling of ditch water. Yet within minutes of actually stepping through the door, I felt something in my shoulders drop. The house has that particular quality of old French country properties, where the walls seem to have absorbed decades of good summers and slow evenings. The stone stays cool even when the sun is doing its worst, and the rooms open into each other with a logic that feels accidental but probably is not.

I stood in the kitchen, still clutching my ridiculous keys, and watched swallows darting over the garden. The pool glimmered at the far end, looking impossibly inviting, and beyond it the Vienne countryside rolled away in shades of green that almost seemed exaggerated. My partner handed me a glass of something local and white and very cold. I drank it too quickly and felt immediately more human.

The owners had left a loaf of bread from the boulangerie in nearby Lencloitre village, some butter, and a pot of jam that tasted properly of strawberries rather than vague red sweetness. We ate it standing at the counter like people who had forgotten basic manners, too hungry and too relieved to bother with plates or ceremony. The cheese was from a farm a few miles east, they told us, and the wine from a vineyard we could actually see from the upstairs window if we squinted.

That evening we walked to the village itself, a ten-minute stroll that felt necessary after the bread and cheese situation. Lencloitre is not a place that shouts for attention. It does not need to. We found a bar-tabac where an old man watched football with the focused intensity of a chess grandmaster, and we drank demi-presses until the light turned golden and the church bell rang without urgency.

I thought about my keys in the ditch, and the donkey's judgement, and how easily a bad arrival can set the tone for an entire holiday if you let it. I decided not to let it. Some mishaps, I reflected, are simply the price of admission for the good stuff that follows.

The swallows were still at it when we wandered back, and the pool caught the last of the sun, and Lencloitre sat there waiting with its cool stone walls and its sense of having all the time in the world.