The SatNav was adamant we had arrived, yet all I could see was a field of sunflowers and what appeared to be a very confident goat. This was not, I felt fairly certain, the charming Provencal cottage I had booked for a week of doing absolutely nothing. My partner, ever the optimist, suggested we ask the goat for directions. I suggested we admit defeat and ring the owner. Pride, as it turns out, is the first thing to go on a proper holiday.

We had driven down from Lyon that morning, a journey that started with good intentions and a carefully curated playlist, and ended with me eating an entire bag of madeleines while my partner muttered about French motorway etiquette. The final stretch through the Alpilles should have been straightforward. It was not. Somewhere near Saint-Remy-de-Provence, we took a wrong turn that led us through three roundabouts, a vineyard, and what I am fairly convinced was someone's private driveway. The goat was merely the final flourish.

When we finally found the actual property, tucked down a narrow lane in Maillane, I understood why the SatNav had thrown its hands up. The place announces itself gradually: first a glimpse of ochre walls through cypress trees, then the scent of lavender that hits you before anything else. By the time we crunched onto the gravel drive, I had already forgiven every wrong turn. The goat, I decided, had been a test. We had failed with spectacular incompetence, but we had arrived.

The owner, a wiry Frenchman named Philippe who spoke English with the kind of precision that made my own seem sloppy, handed over the keys with minimal ceremony and a warning about the outdoor shower. "It is cold," he said, with the satisfaction of someone who had clearly fielded complaints before. "But it is good for the character." I nodded as if this were precisely what I had hoped for.

The cottage itself was simple in the best possible way. Thick stone walls that kept the heat at bay, terracotta floors that felt deliciously cool under bare feet, and shutters that squeaked when you pushed them open. The kitchen had a proper gas hob, a fridge that hummed contentedly, and not a single dishwasher tablet in sight. Philippe had left a bottle of local rose on the counter, which I opened within approximately four minutes of him leaving. Standards, I find, are flexible on the first day of a holiday.

But it was the garden that truly did me in. A proper walled affair, private and slightly overgrown in that deliberate French way, with a stone terrace where a wrought-iron table sat waiting. There was a fig tree heavy with fruit, a climbing rose that had ambitions of its own, and a small patch of lawn that had clearly given up on perfection decades ago. I spent the first hour simply wandering its perimeter with my wine, touching leaves and failing to identify anything with confidence.

We had brought books, of course. Stacks of them, optimistically packed back in London when we still believed we might hike or explore or do something worthy of a holiday anecdote. By the second afternoon, I had abandoned any pretence of activity. I moved between the terrace and a weathered wooden lounger in the dappled shade, reading the same paragraph repeatedly because the bees were too distracting. My partner dozed with a hat over his face. The washing-up piled up with cheerful abandon. We ate bread and cheese and tomatoes that tasted of actual sunshine, and we spoke in half-sentences, too lazy to finish our thoughts.

The outdoor shower, I should report, was indeed cold. I used it once, shrieked with undignified volume, and retreated to the proper bathroom for the remainder of the week. My character, I decided, was quite developed enough.

There was a moment, perhaps on the third day, when I realised I had not checked my phone in twenty-four hours. The notification anxiety that usually hums beneath everything had simply gone quiet. I sat with this discovery for a while, watching a lizard sun itself on the wall, and felt something close to smug. This was the point, I suppose. Not the lavender fields or the picturesque villages or any of the things I had researched with such diligence. Just this: warmth, stillness, the particular quality of light that makes reading feel like an event rather than a distraction.

We did venture to the boulangerie in Maillane most mornings, a ten-minute stroll that became the day's primary exertion. The baker knew our order by the third visit, which felt like an achievement of sorts. Once we cycled to Saint-Remy, a gentle pedal through flat countryside that left us disproportionately pleased with ourselves. We bought olives at a market, carried them home sweating and triumphant, and ate them in the garden with more wine than was strictly necessary.

But mostly we did very little, and that very little was everything. The books got read, slowly. The figs ripened and were eaten straight from the tree, sticky and warm. The rose bush dropped petals onto the terrace, and neither of us swept them up. By the final day, I had forgotten what day it actually was, and found I did not much care to remember.

We left the keys on the kitchen table, loaded the car with dirty laundry and regret, and drove back past the field of sunflowers. The goat, I noted with satisfaction, was nowhere to be seen. Some things, I suppose, are best encountered only once.