I have never been so pleased to see a village petrol station in my life. Three hours out of Marseille, two wrong turns past Arles, and one spectacular argument about whether I had packed the satnav charger, we finally limped into Maussane-les-Alpilles with the fuel light glaring like a furious orange eye. The mishap? I had not packed the satnav charger. My wife had. In her bag. Which she had reminded me about twice. I spent the last forty minutes of the drive in noble silence, pretending to enjoy the scenery while she navigated using a phone at four per cent battery and the occasional furious hand gesture.

The house, when we found it, sat behind a low stone wall with lavender bushes that had clearly given up on proper behaviour and sprawled everywhere. Our daughter bolted for the pool before I had even killed the engine. Our son stood in the gravel driveway, blinking, still wearing the headphones he had not removed since Gatwick. I hauled cases from the boot while my wife located the key safe, which involved a torch app, some creative language, and a spider that she insists was the size of a dinner plate but was probably closer to a fifty pence piece.

Inside, the place smelled of wood polish and something else I could not place. Dried herbs, perhaps, or just the particular stillness of a house that has been waiting. The kitchen opened straight onto a terrace with one of those long wooden tables that makes you immediately picture yourself drinking rose at sunset like a person in a magazine. In reality we ate crisps and argued about who was fetching the luggage, but the potential was there, shimmering, waiting for us to catch up with it.

I am going to be honest about the pool. It was freezing. Our daughter cannonballed in with the fearless stupidity of the young and emerged forty seconds later making noises like a deflating balloon. The rest of us spent the week doing that thing where you lower yourself in by degrees, swearing gently, until someone pushes you. There is always someone who pushes you. In our family it is me, and I have no regrets.

The village itself revealed itself slowly, which is the only way villages like this should reveal themselves. A boulangerie where the woman remembered our order by day three. A small square with a fountain where our son finally removed his headphones, distracted by a dog that appeared to be walking itself. Narrow streets that smelled of baking and, at certain hours, of the olive mill on the edge of town, which sent out this extraordinary green-gold scent that made you hungry even when you were not.

What struck me most, I think, was the rhythm of it. We are not a family that does well with rhythms. We are a family that does well with screens and schedules and the low-grade panic of running late. Here, the days stretched and contracted in ways I had forgotten they could. Mornings were for market bread and coffee that took forever because nobody was rushing. Afternoons dissolved into poolside dozing and the particular torture of French crossword puzzles, which I am terrible at but attempt anyway out of some misguided holiday optimism. Evenings meant cooking with too much garlic, drinking slightly too much wine, and watching the light change on the Alpilles hills until someone remembered the children had not had a proper bath in two days.

I should mention the cicadas. Nobody had warned me adequately about the cicadas. The first night I lay awake convinced something was wrong with the house, some electrical fault or hidden machinery. By the third night I found their racket almost comforting, a constant shimmering backdrop that made the silence when it finally came feel earned rather than empty.

On our last morning I woke early and sat on that terrace with a coffee, watching mist lift from the olive groves. Our daughter had left a half-eaten apricot on the table, already attracting adventurous wasps. Our son's abandoned trainers sat by the pool where he had kicked them off. The chaos of us, temporarily stilled, temporarily happy, temporarily somewhere that felt like it might have been waiting specifically for this.

We left the satnav charger behind, obviously. The owners can post it, or keep it, or use it to curse forgetful English families. I did not mind. Some part of me wanted an excuse to go back, though I would never have admitted it aloud.