I should have known the holiday gods were having a laugh when my suitcase wheel fell off at Gatwick. Not at the end, mind you. Right at the start, in the middle of the terminal, with a queue of very patient Italians behind me trying to get to the check-in desk. I did that thing where you pretend everything is completely normal, dragging the thing along like a wounded animal, while internally plotting how to survive a week in Sardinia with one pair of trousers and a questionable attitude.

The flight to Olbia was mercifully short, though I spent most of it wedged between a man who snored like a cement mixer and a child who wanted to discuss dinosaurs in exhaustive detail. I now know more about the Triassic period than I do about my own mortgage. From Olbia, the drive to Porto Cervo took about forty minutes, winding through scrubby maquis and sudden, shocking glimpses of turquoise water that made me forget entirely about the suitcase situation.

The property sat on a gentle slope above the coastline, all creamy stone and terracotta tiles that looked like they had been baked by decades of Mediterranean sun. I fumbled with the key safe for a solid ten minutes, convinced I had been sent the wrong code, before realising I was holding the instructions upside down. This is what happens when you travel with one functioning brain cell and a suitcase held together by airport security tape.

Stepping inside, the coolness hit me first. Proper thick-walled Sardinian coolness, none of your flimsy air conditioning. The living space opened onto a terrace through sliding doors, and I made straight for it like a pigeon spotting a dropped chip. The view stopped me mid-step. That stretch of coastline, all granite boulders and water so clear you could count the pebbles on the seabed, made the whole ridiculous journey feel like a conspiracy to deliver me to this exact moment.

I will confess something here. I had packed for glamour. Linen shirts, decent sandals, the sort of holiday wardrobe that suggests a person who knows about wine and has opinions on olive oil. Within two hours of arrival, I was in swimming trunks and a faded t-shirt, barefoot on the terrace, eating bread and pecorino that I had bought from a tiny alimentari in the village because I could not be bothered to find a proper restaurant. It was possibly the best meal I had eaten in months.

The village itself crept up on me. Porto Cervo is one of those places that photographs beautifully and knows it, all pastel facades and yacht masts gleaming in the harbour. I wandered down in the early evening, still slightly dazed from travel, and found myself at a waterfront bar watching the sun drop behind the headland while a very small dog wearing a bow tie sat at the next table. I did not question this. I simply ordered a mirto and accepted that this was my life now.

That first night, I slept with the terrace doors open, which seemed terribly romantic until the local cicadas started up at five in the morning with the enthusiasm of a warehouse rave. I lay there in the half-dark, listening to this wall of insect noise, and felt something shift. The suitcase with its missing wheel was propped in the corner like a sad monument to my incompetence. The linen shirts hung untouched. I had already sanded my feet raw on the local rocks and acquired a sunburn in the exact shape of my sunglasses.

None of it mattered. The mishaps had become the story, the slightly battered entry into something that already felt less like a holiday and more like a place I was supposed to have reached much earlier, by much easier means, and somehow never did.