The sat nav had been insisting for a good twenty minutes that we were "arriving at destination," which was doing my head in somewhat, given that all I could see were olive groves and the occasional startled goat. My partner Dave was doing that thing where he gripped the steering wheel too tightly and hummed tunelessly, a sure sign he was trying not to say something he'd regret. The kids, meanwhile, had reached that stage of the journey where they'd gone through bored, out the other side into delirious, and were now composing a song about needing a wee that was frankly too catchy for its own good.

The mishap, when it came, was spectacularly mine. We'd finally spotted the turning, a narrow track between two stone walls, and Dave had gamely eased our hire car through. I spotted a figure waving from a terrace and, in my excitement to finally be somewhere that wasn't a Spanish A-road, I flung open my door without checking my mirror. Straight into a very handsome, very solid terracotta planter. The crash made everyone jump, including the goat I'd spotted earlier, who'd apparently been following us out of sheer nosiness. The planter wobbled, teetered, and by some miracle stayed upright. A chip the size of a fifty pence piece now adorned its rim, and I stood there doing that awful British thing of apologising to an inanimate object while the kids howled with laughter from their windows.

Our host, Miguel, descended the steps with the relaxed pace of a man who'd seen far worse from holidaymakers. He simply shrugged, said something in Spanish that Dave later claimed meant "the planter has character now," and helped us with our bags as if door-related pottery incidents happened daily. Which, for all I know, they do.

The cortijo itself was immediately, impossibly lovely. Whitewashed walls glowing pinkish in the late afternoon sun, a proper tiled roof with those curved terracotta ridges, and a covered terrace where a wooden table sat waiting with a bowl of lemons from the garden. The kids bolted past us to investigate the pool, which Miguel had described modestly as "small" but which looked absolutely enormous to anyone used to a Manchester semi's back garden. Dave and I stood on the gravel courtyard and just breathed. It smelled of jasmine and warm stone and something herby that I couldn't identify, probably because my gardening expertise extends to keeping a supermarket basil alive for approximately four days.

Inside, the place had that brilliant Spanish knack of being cool despite the heat, with tiled floors and wooden shutters and ceilings high enough to make you feel slightly regal. The kitchen was clearly someone's actual kitchen rather than a holiday afterthought, with a proper gas hob and a coffee maker that looked like it meant business. I ran my hand along the wooden countertop and felt that lovely shift that happens on holiday, where the everyday stuff of home - the washing up, the cooking, the refereeing of children - somehow becomes permissible, even pleasant, when done in someone else's beautiful house in a different light.

Dave appeared with two glasses of something cold and local, and we settled onto those terrace chairs as the sun began dropping behind the hills. The kids were already in the pool, shrieking about something, and a gecko had appeared on the wall to observe proceedings with obvious disdain. I thought about my chipped planter, about Miguel's easy kindness, about how I'd nearly let a moment of clumsy embarrassment spoil the first hour of a week that suddenly stretched ahead full of nothing much at all. The goat had wandered off. The jasmine smelled stronger as the evening cooled. I decided, right then, that this was exactly my sort of holiday: slightly shambolic, thoroughly unplanned, and absolutely perfect.