I have never been so relieved to see a swimming pool in my life, and that includes the time I fell into a canal in Amsterdam.

The drive from Reus Airport to Miami Platja had been straightforward enough, or so I thought. My hire car came with a sat nav that clearly fancied itself as a rally co-driver, barking "turn left" with such aggressive timing that I twice missed the junction and found myself heading towards some chap's olive grove. By the third attempt I was sweating through my shirt, craning over the wheel like a pensioner at bingo, and muttering apologies to absolutely no one.

Then came the mishap. I had stopped at a petrol station just outside Cambrils to buy water and, in my infinite wisdom, decided to practice my Spanish. "Dos botellas de agua, por favor," I said, rather pleased with myself. The woman behind the counter, Maria according to her badge, blinked at me. "Parlem catala aqui," she said, not unkindly. I stood there like a lemon, clutching my euros, until she took pity and switched to English. "We speak Catalan here," she explained, then leaned forward conspiratorially. "But your Spanish was very... enthusiastic."

I arrived at the villa pink-faced and slightly deflated, only to discover I had been pressing the intercom for apartment three instead of the main office. A man named Pere eventually shuffled out, wearing sandals with socks and a vest that had seen better decades. He squinted at my booking printout, turned it upside down, then handed it back. "You are the English," he stated, as if diagnosing a condition. "I am Pere. I fix everything. Everything I fix." This turned out to be largely aspirational, as the patio light would flicker dramatically every evening, and Pere would appear each morning with a different screwdriver, shaking his head at it like it had personally betrayed him.

The neighbours arrived the next day, a family from Barcelona whose grandmother, Montse, immediately commandeered the communal garden bench. She spoke no English and I no Catalan, yet we spent twenty minutes in passionate conversation about tomatoes. I understood none of it, but gathered I had committed some grave error in my salad preparation the previous evening. She demonstrated proper tomato slicing with the urgency of a surgeon, then presented me with three from her own bag, still warm from the sun. "No fridge," she insisted, tapping my arm for emphasis. I have followed this instruction religiously ever since.

Down at the beach, a man called Lluis rented loungers with the melancholy air of someone who had once had greater ambitions. He had studied philosophy at university, he told me, on day three when I finally asked why he always carried a paperback in Greek. "Heraclitus," he said, gesturing at the sea. "You cannot step in the same river twice." I nodded sagely, though my primary concern was whether the ice cream van would return before closing. Lluis found this hilarious. "You English," he said, not for the last time. "Always the ice cream."

The woman in the supermarket, Carme, became something of a confidante despite our language barrier. She would hold up items and wait for my theatrical reactions, applauding when I correctly identified morcilla or recoiling dramatically at my accidental purchase of salted cod. Once I bought what I thought was orange juice and turned out to be something called orxata, which Carme found so amusing she called her husband from the back to witness my face.

By the end of the week, Pere had fixed the light by removing the bulb entirely, Montse had adopted me as a project, and Lluis had lent me his Heraclitus book, which remains unread on my shelf in Manchester. I left Miami Platja with a boot full of tomatoes, a newfound respect for Catalan stubbornness, and the certain knowledge that enthusiasm counts for more than grammar when it comes to being understood.