I have never been so relieved to see a goat as I was when we finally found our holiday let in Arenys de Munt. The Sat Nav had given up about twenty minutes earlier, somewhere around a bend in the road where a man was selling melons from the back of a van, and my partner Dave had declared with absolute confidence that he knew exactly where we were going. Reader, he did not. We had already done one full loop of what felt like the same narrow lane, passing a particularly judgmental-looking herd of goats each time, and I was beginning to wonder if we would be spending our first night sleeping in the hire car with only a bag of airport Haribo for sustenance.

The third time we passed the goats, I swear one of them shook its head. That was the moment I took charge, wound down the window, and asked the melon man for directions in my best GCSE Spanish. He looked at me with what I can only describe as profound pity, then pointed straight up a hill I had not even noticed existed. Ten minutes of increasingly hopeful driving later, we found it: a lovely stone house with a terrace that looked out over the rolling hills of Catalonia, and a kitchen that smelled faintly of the previous guests' cooking successes.

Within half an hour of arrival, I had already committed my first culinary error. The local shop in Arenys de Munt is a proper family-run affair, the kind where the butcher knows everyone's business and the vegetable display looks like a still life painting. I went in with grand plans, armed with a translation app and excessive confidence, and emerged with what I thought was a beautiful piece of beef for our first dinner. It was not beef. It was horse, which the butcher had been trying to tell me in increasingly animated Catalan while I nodded and smiled like a complete fool. Dave found this absolutely hilarious until I pointed out that he had eaten two portions before I noticed the label.

The next morning, properly chastened, I went to the weekly market that sets up near the church. This became my absolute ritual for the rest of the stay. The smell of fresh bread from the bakery stall hit me before I even saw it, and I developed what Dave called my "market face" - that particular expression of intense concentration I wear when trying to appear knowledgeable about cheese. I bought tomatoes that actually tasted of something, which as a Brit who has spent years eating supermarket ones is genuinely shocking. I bought olives from a woman who let me try seven varieties before I chose, and I am fairly certain she was quietly testing my resolve. I bought a sausage called botifarra that looked suspiciously like a small truncheon and tasted absolutely magnificent sliced thick and fried with eggs.

The kitchen at the house became my domain, which Dave accepted with the understanding that he would wash up and stop mentioning the horse incident. I attempted paella on our third night, having watched approximately twelve YouTube videos and purchased what I believed to be the correct rice. It was not the correct rice. It turned into something more like a rice soup with aspirations, which we ate on the terrace with rather too much wine and agreed was actually quite pleasant if you did not think about what it was supposed to be. The local wine, by the way, is from the Alella region just down the road, and I became genuinely annoying about recommending it to anyone who would listen.

By the end of the week, I had mastered the art of the simple Catalan lunch: bread rubbed with tomato and garlic, good olive oil, some of that botifarra sliced thin, maybe a few anchovies if I was feeling brave. I learned to ask for things properly, or at least properly enough that people stopped looking at me with concern. I learned that the melon man's melons were genuinely excellent, and that I should have bought one on that first day instead of getting lost again.

On our final morning, I made one last trip to the market and bought far too much of everything, somehow imagining I could transport fresh cheese and cured meats back through airport security without incident. I could not. The security man at Barcelona took my sobrassada with what I can only describe as professional sadness, as if he had done this many times before to many hopeful Brits. I thought about arguing, then thought about the horse incident, and decided some things are simply meant to stay in Catalonia.