I have never been so relieved to see a swimming pool in my life, and that includes the time I fell into the Thames during a corporate rowing event. But I am getting ahead of myself.

The drive from Perugia Airport to Magione had been going suspiciously well. My wife had dozed off, the children were miraculously quiet in the back, and I had even managed to navigate the hire car through two roundabouts without inducing a domestic. The sat nav said we were twelve minutes away when I spotted what I thought was a shortcut. A dusty track between olive groves. Very rustic. Very me.

It was not a shortcut. It was a farm access road that deposited us in a field of sunflowers, surrounded by what I can only describe as extremely judgmental sheep. I spent twenty minutes performing a seventeen-point turn while my son provided unhelpful commentary and my daughter asked whether we were going to live here now. My wife simply opened one eye and said, "I knew it." She always knows it.

By the time we found the actual entrance to our holiday home, I was ready to abandon the car and walk the remaining distance barefoot. But then we crested the little hill and there it was: a proper stone farmhouse with terracotta roof tiles, wooden shutters, and that particular honey-coloured light that seems to exist only in Umbria. The children fell silent. Even the sheep had nothing to say about this.

The key was in the lockbox exactly as promised, which felt like a small miracle given my track record with such things. I fumbled the code twice, conscious of my audience, before the door swung open onto a kitchen that smelled faintly of rosemary and old wood. Terracotta floors, beamed ceiling, a table that looked like it had hosted a thousand family meals. My wife ran her hand along the counter and raised an eyebrow in approval, which is her highest domestic compliment.

The children had already vanished. I found them in the garden, arguing about who had spotted the pool first. It was not enormous, but it was ours, fringed with lavender and potted plants that someone had clearly tended with care. Beyond it, the land rolled away in waves of green and gold, dotted with cypress trees and the occasional distant farmhouse. No traffic noise. Just cicadas and something that might have been a distant tractor, or perhaps a very contented cow.

I will confess something here. I am not naturally good at doing nothing. My idea of relaxation usually involves checking work emails in a different location. But standing on that terrace with a lukewarm bottle of water and dust still on my shoes from my agricultural detour, I felt something shift. The children were already in their swimming costumes, despite not having unpacked a single thing. My wife was examining the outdoor barbecue with the focused attention she usually reserves for important spreadsheets. Nobody was asking what time it was or what we were doing next.

We did eventually unpack, after a fashion. The children claimed bedrooms with the strategic precision of seasoned negotiators. My wife and I took the room with the view, obviously. I spent a solid ten minutes trying to work the Italian coffee maker before realising I had assembled it backwards, a fact my son pointed out with the particular delight only an eight-year-old can muster.

Dinner that first evening was simple to the point of comedy. Bread, cheese, tomatoes from a farm shop we had passed in our unintentional rural tour, and a bottle of local wine that cost less than a London coffee. We ate outside as the light faded, the children still damp from the pool, me still slightly dusty, all of us slightly sun-drunk and stupidly happy.

I kept waiting for the familiar itch to check my phone, to plan tomorrow, to turn this into something productive. It never came. Instead I found myself watching a gecko on the wall, listening to my daughter explain the rules of a game she had invented involving pool floats and elaborate scoring, and thinking that perhaps I had been doing holidays wrong for quite some time.

The stars came out properly after dark, the way they only do when you are far enough from everything else. My wife poured the last of the wine. The children, finally exhausted, had gone to bed without the usual protracted negotiations. I sat there with my feet up, slightly sunburned on the back of my neck, and made a decision I have never managed before on holiday.

I decided to worry about absolutely nothing until morning.