I have never been so grateful to see a set of IKEA patio chairs in my entire life. Fourteen hours after leaving a drizzly Luton Airport, I finally rolled up to our holiday home in Lloret de Mar with a suitcase containing approximately three pairs of pants and, inexplicably, a fondue set.

The fondue set requires explanation. In my pre-dawn packing panic, I had grabbed what I thought was my travel iron from the cupboard under the stairs. It was not the travel iron. I discovered this at Gatwick while rummaging for my boarding pass, confronted by four cheese forks and a spirit burner. My partner just looked at me with the particular expression of someone who has made peace with my nonsense over eleven years.

The drive from Barcelona had been straightforward enough until I got overconfident with a Catalan road sign and took us on a scenic detour through somebody's olive grove. Google Maps called it a "road." The local farmer, leaning on a gate with what I can only describe as deeply amused resignation, clearly had other opinions. We waved. He waved back. Nobody was angry. This is the magic of Spain.

Arriving at the property, the first thing that struck me was the smell. Not the fondue set, thankfully, but jasmine and something citrusy drifting from a tree I later learned was a bitter orange. The house sat on a hillside with terraces stepping down toward glimpses of the Mediterranean, which I had honestly forgotten existed during my fourteen-hour slog through airports, hire car queues, and that olive grove.

The key was in a lockbox, which I fumbled with for an embarrassing length of time. My hands were doing that post-flight tremor thing where you have consumed too much coffee and not enough actual food. When the door finally clicked open, cool tile hit my face like a blessing. Catalan builders understand heat. Thick walls, shutters that actually close properly, ceiling fans turning lazily overhead. I stood in the hallway and just breathed for a moment, aware of how thoroughly I had been existing in my own head for hours.

The kitchen was compact but properly equipped, which mattered because I had already decided the fondue set was staying in the suitcase as a sort of holiday mascot. A proper hob, decent knives, a fridge that hummed reassuringly. I opened it to find nothing but the previous guests' forgotten jar of anchovy-stuffed olives and a lemon. It felt like a welcome gift from strangers.

But the terrace. That was where everything shifted. I dragged my sorry carcass outside with a lukewarm can of Estrella from the petrol station, and there it was. The view I had been too frazzled to appreciate properly from the car. The coastline curving away, the particular blue of this stretch of Mediterranean, a fishing boat puttering home somewhere below. A gecko darted across the wall. Swallows were doing their evening circuits.

I sat in one of those IKEA chairs and felt something in my chest actually loosen. Not dramatically. Nothing cinematic. Just the gradual realisation that I had been holding my shoulders somewhere near my ears since approximately March, and that perhaps they could live somewhere else for a while.

My partner emerged with two proper glasses and the rest of the warm beers. We clinked them with the cheerful incompetence of people who have survived their own journey. Somewhere in Lloret de Mar proper, I could hear distant music starting up for the evening, but up here there was just breeze and that gecko, who I had already named Gerald, reappearing to judge us silently from the wall.

The mishaps mattered, I realised. The fondue set, the olive grove, the lockbox. They were the price of arrival. And arrival, when it finally came, felt properly earned.