The sat nav had been insisting for a good twenty minutes that we were basically already there, which was deeply impressive given that we were currently crawling past what appeared to be someone's lemon grove at approximately the speed of a reluctant tortoise. My wife was navigating with her phone, I was pretending the hire car's clutch wasn't making that worrying grinding noise, and our youngest was asking for the third time whether Spain had different gravity to England. It was, in short, going brilliantly.

We found the turning eventually, a narrow lane between stone walls that looked like it had been built with mules rather than machinery in mind. The kind of road where you meet another car and someone has to reverse half a mile while making increasingly desperate eye contact. I was concentrating so hard on not scraping the wing mirrors that I completely missed the property entrance and had to execute what the children generously called a "three-point turn" and what actually involved seven points, a small wall, and some creative language that I pretended was Catalan.

But then we were there. And I mean properly there, in that way that makes you forget the journey entirely.

The villa sat among olive trees and what I later learned were Alella wine vines, though at first glance I just thought they were very organised bushes with excellent posture. The stone walls had that soft, honeyed colour that only seems to exist in Mediterranean afternoon light, and a terrace that looked like it had been waiting specifically for someone to sit on it with a glass of something cold and a complete absence of urgency. Our eldest immediately claimed the pool, which was one of those proper, slightly irregular shapes that suggested it had been there longer than any of us had been alive. The water had that particular blue you only get when the sky has been showing off all day.

Inside smelled of wood polish and dried lavender, which I realise sounds like something from a pretentious brochure, but honestly it did. The kitchen had terracotta tiles that were pleasingly uneven underfoot and a proper fireplace that I mentally bookmarked for the evenings, even though it was currently thirty degrees and the children were threatening heatstroke at the mere suggestion of socks. The bedrooms were cool and dark with shutters that actually worked, not like our flimsy efforts at home that let in every hint of daylight at five in the morning.

I found myself standing at the kitchen window with a cup of tea I hadn't finished, just watching a gecko make its way across the wall outside. There was a lemon tree heavy with fruit practically tapping on the glass, and somewhere in the distance a dog was barking with the lazy rhythm of something that had absolutely nothing to guard. My wife came and leaned against the counter, and we stood there in the kind of comfortable silence that only really happens on holiday, when you've temporarily misplaced your to-do list and can't be bothered to go looking for it.

The children had already established a complex system of pool rules that involved a lot of shouting and no actual adherence to any rules whatsoever. I thought about intervening, then didn't. The gecko disappeared into a crack in the wall. The dog stopped barking, apparently satisfied.

We'd brought books we wouldn't finish, board games we'd argue over gently, and enough supermarket provisions to suggest we'd expected Catalonia to have run out of food entirely. The village of Alella itself was a short wander away, though that evening we didn't even manage that, too busy grilling something simple on the terrace barbecue and watching the light change over the vines. The children ate too much bread. I drank a local wine that cost embarrassingly little and tasted like someone had bottled the afternoon itself.

By nine o'clock the sky was doing that remarkable thing where it stays light forever but the temperature drops to something actually pleasant, and we sat out with the citronella candles doing their valiant best against the occasional mosquito. I thought about how we'd nearly not booked this, how we'd nearly done something more ambitious, more scheduled, more exhausting. The gecko reappeared on the wall, possibly the same one, possibly its cousin, definitely unbothered by our presence.

I raised my glass to it, which felt slightly mad, but then that is rather the point of a proper holiday.