I have never been so relieved to see a stone wall in my life. After six hours of driving from Marseille airport, during which I managed to get spectacularly lost outside Avignon, I finally crawled up the winding road to Venasque and found myself staring at what I hoped was my holiday home. The sat nav had given up twenty minutes earlier, and I had been navigating by instinct, which is a generous way of saying I had been following a man on a scooter who looked like he knew where he was going.

The mishap, because there is always one with me, came at the very end. I pulled into the gravel drive, exhausted and triumphant, and promptly reversed into a lavender bush. Not a small one either. A substantial, established, probably quite proud lavender bush that had been minding its own business for years. I sat there for a moment, wondering if I could somehow blame the bush for being in an inconvenient location, before accepting that this was simply my arrival energy. Some people arrive gracefully. I arrive with gardening casualties.

Stepping out of the car, the first thing that hit me was the smell. That proper Provence smell, the one that makes you slightly annoyed at how perfect everything is. Lavender, obviously, now with added tyre marks. Dry earth and herbs and something warm and baked that I later realised was just the stone of the house itself, heated by the afternoon sun. I stood there like an idiot, sniffing, while a lizard watched me from the wall with what I can only describe as polite confusion.

The house was smaller than I expected and somehow better for it. A low stone building with shutters that had that particular faded blue you cannot buy in a shop, the kind that only comes from decades of sun and wind and not caring what anyone thinks. The key was exactly where the owner said it would be, which felt like a small miracle given my navigation record. I pushed open the door and was met by cool darkness and the faint smell of wood polish and old books.

I did not do much that first afternoon. This is important. I want to be clear about this because my usual holiday self would have been researching walking routes or planning market visits or feeling guilty about not maximising the experience. Instead, I found a chair in the garden. It was not even a particularly good chair, slightly wobbly, with a faded cushion that had seen better decades. I sat in it. That was the activity. I sat, and I looked at the view, which was of olive trees and distant hills and a sky that seemed to go on for longer than skies do at home.

Somewhere in the village, a dog barked once and thought better of it. A bee investigated my shoe and moved on to more interesting prospects. I had brought three books and read perhaps four pages of one before dozing off, waking confused and slightly dribbling, with no idea what time it was. The light had changed, that was all I knew. The shadows had shifted across the terrace. My phone was in the house and I did not care.

The garden became my world for those first days. There was a small table under a fig tree where I ate breakfast, cutting chunks of bread and cheese with a knife that was not quite sharp enough, which somehow made it better. I discovered that figs, when warm from the sun, taste completely different from supermarket figs. This felt like important research. I conducted extensive further studies, mostly lying on a blanket with my eyes closed, listening to the cicadas start up their afternoon shift.

I did walk into the village once, on the second day, motivated mainly by a need for more wine. Venasque itself is tiny, perched on its hill, all narrow passages and sudden views. I bought bread and wine and some tomatoes that actually tasted of something, then hurried back, slightly overwhelmed by the exertion of being a person doing things. The house pulled me back. The garden waited, patient and indifferent to achievement.

By the third day, I had stopped checking the time entirely. The only schedule was the sun's movement across the terrace, which determined where I next moved my chair. I read the same paragraph multiple times without frustration. I watched ants carrying crumbs with genuine interest. I became, briefly and gloriously, a person who did very little, and found that this was exactly enough.

On my last morning, I packed the car with the same incompetence I had arrived with, though I checked carefully for lavender bushes. I took one final walk around the garden, memorising the smell of the herbs I had not learned the names of, the particular quality of light through the fig leaves. I had not seen the famous nearby sights. I had not done Provence properly, by any conventional measure. I had sat, and dozed, and eaten simple things slowly, and let the world narrow to the size of a stone house and its garden.

Driving away, I caught myself smiling at nothing in particular. The man on the scooter passed me going the other direction, still looking like he knew where he was going. I did not follow him this time. I had my own route now, slower and slightly lost and entirely the right way to go.