I have never been particularly brilliant at reading maps, which is how I ended up circling the same roundabout in Coma-Ruga three times before realising the villa was literally fifty metres behind me. My partner sat in the passenger seat making that particular face he does, the one that says he is being very patient but would quite like to throttle me with a sangria stirrer. We had been driving from Barcelona Airport for the best part of ninety minutes, the hire car smelling of cheap pine air freshener and my own quiet panic, and by the time I finally crunched onto the gravel drive of Francas I was ready to abandon the vehicle entirely and sprint for the nearest sun lounger.

The first thing that struck me was the stillness. After the motorway noise and my own rather frantic navigation, stepping out into that garden felt like walking through a door into another world. The villa sat there in typical Catalan fashion, all whitewashed walls and terracotta roof tiles, not trying to impress anyone but managing to look rather smug about its own effortless charm. A bougainvillea had gone absolutely berserk up one wall, shocking pink against the white, and somewhere a cicada was already doing its afternoon shift.

I made straight for the pool, naturally, because I am a creature of simple pleasures and the temperature had nudged thirty degrees. The water was that perfect level of cool that makes you gasp for exactly half a second before your body adjusts and you remember that this, this right here, is why you bothered with the budget airline and the overpriced airport sandwich. I floated on my back and looked up at a sky so aggressively blue it felt almost theatrical.

My partner, ever the practical one, had already begun unpacking and was making pleased noises about the kitchen. I hauled myself out eventually, dripping across the terrace in a manner that would have horrified my mother, and discovered he had opened a bottle of local white wine and was looking thoroughly pleased with himself. We sat there in those rather wonderful wooden chairs, the ones that creak companionably when you shift your weight, and did absolutely nothing of consequence for several hours.

That first evening we wandered down to the seafront, perhaps ten minutes on foot, and I was struck by how gloriously unpretentious everything felt. Coma-Ruga is not trying to be Barcelona or Sitges, and there is something deeply refreshing about that. We ate grilled sardines at a beachside place where the waiter seemed faintly amused by our attempts at Catalan, then wandered back as the light turned that particular honey colour it does here, the one that makes even my rather ordinary photographs look almost artistic.

The days that followed settled into a rhythm so lazy it bordered on the horizontal. Morning coffee on the terrace, watching the neighbour's cat make its patrol across the wall. A slow walk to the beach for a swim in water so salty you float without trying. Back for lunch of bread and tomatoes and that glorious local olive oil, eaten with our hands like absolute savages. Afternoon reading by the pool, turning pages with sticky fingers, occasionally dozing off with the book on my chest.

I had brought three novels and finished none of them, which I consider a peculiar sort of success. There is something about proper heat and proper quiet that unspools your concentration in the most wonderful way. I would find myself reading the same paragraph three times, not because I was confused but because it simply did not matter, because the words were pleasant company rather than urgent information.

On our third day we made it to the local market in El Vendrell, perhaps twenty minutes away, and I bought a sun hat of such extraordinary ugliness that my partner refused to walk beside me while I wore it. I loved it immediately and wore it constantly. We came back with peaches that tasted of actual sunshine, and some rather dubious local cheese that we ate anyway, and the general sense that we had done something terribly adventurous by leaving the villa at all.

By the end of the week I had stopped checking my phone entirely, a feat I had previously considered medically impossible. The villa had worked its particular magic, the magic of places that ask nothing of you but presence. I sat on that terrace on our final morning, watching the bougainvillea move slightly in a breeze I could not actually feel, and felt something in my chest unclench that I had not realised was tight.

We left the key in the lock and the ugly hat on my head, and I managed the roundabout perfectly on the first attempt, which felt like the most unnecessary sort of triumph.