I have never been a natural at reading maps, which is a polite way of saying I once got spectacularly lost trying to find a petrol station three streets from my house. So when my partner handed me the directions to our holiday let in Sant Cebria de Vallalta, I felt the familiar prickle of impending disaster.

We had flown into Barcelona and collected a hire car that smelled aggressively of pine air freshener. The drive north was straightforward enough, skimming along the coast with the Mediterranean winking at us through the gaps in the hills. Then we turned inland, and everything became narrow lanes, sudden forks, and road signs that seemed to have been arranged by someone with a mischievous sense of humour. I missed our turn twice, once because I was admiring a particularly handsome goat, and the second time because I was still laughing about the goat. By the time we found the right track, I had worked myself into that peculiar state of British travel anxiety where you start making jokes too loudly and checking your phone every eleven seconds.

The property sat at the end of a dusty lane, half-hidden by pines and olive trees. A stone villa with terracotta tiles and shutters that had faded to the colour of old strawberries. I stumbled out of the car, slightly dizzy from the heat and my own incompetence, and immediately walked into a low branch. My partner found this hilarious. I decided to find it hilarious too, mostly because we had arrived and I had not technically driven us into the sea.

The owner had left the key in a ceramic pot shaped like a frog. Inside, the house was deliciously cool, all tiled floors and whitewashed walls, with French doors thrown open to a terrace that looked down over a valley of cork oaks. I stood there with my bag still on my shoulder, feeling the sweat cooling on my neck, and something in my chest unclenched. The mishaps of the journey already felt like someone else's story.

We did very little that first afternoon, which was precisely the point. I dragged a sun lounger to the edge of the terrace and lay there with a book I had been meaning to read since approximately 2019. Every few pages I would look up at the swallows darting overhead, or watch a lizard perform lazy push-ups on the warm stone. My partner dozed under a straw hat that made her look like a minor character in a Hercule Poirot mystery. Somewhere in the valley, a dog barked once and thought better of it.

The village itself, when we finally wandered down the next morning, took roughly four minutes to explore properly. A church with a clock that appeared to have stopped in 1987, a small shop selling bread and local wine, and a bar where elderly men played cards with the solemn concentration of chess grandmasters. We bought tomatoes that tasted of actual sunlight and ate them on the terrace with olive oil and salt, arguing about whether we could justify another cup of coffee before a proper lunch.

I had packed trainers with the vague intention of vigorous morning walks, perhaps even something approaching a hike. They remained in my bag for five days. Instead I developed a routine of staggering to the terrace with coffee, reading until the words blurred, then migrating to the pool with the energetic purposefulness of a very old tortoise. The water was cold enough to make me gasp dramatically, which I did every single time, as if surprised.

On our fourth day, I realised I had not checked my work email once. This felt less like an achievement and more like discovering I had accidentally learned to breathe underwater. I mentioned this to my partner, who was face-down on a lounger with a novel about murder in a finishing school. She made a noise that might have been congratulatory or might have been sleep. Either way, I took it.

We did explore slightly further afield, though "explore" is doing some heavy lifting. A morning at the beach in Sant Pol de Mar, where I paddled with the enthusiasm of a Labrador and ate fried fish from paper cones. An afternoon drive to a vineyard where we pretended to understand terms like "minerality" and bought three bottles we almost certainly chose for their labels. But always we returned to the villa by late afternoon, drawn back to that terrace and its particular quality of light, the way the hills turned purple as the sun dropped.

I finished my book on the penultimate day, which felt like a personal triumph given my usual habit of abandoning novels around page eighty. I started another immediately, something about a woman who inherits a crumbling house in Provence, and found myself irritatingly pleased by how much of it I understood. The lizard had become a regular companion, or possibly several lizards I had anthropomorphised into one. I named him Gerald. My partner refused to engage with this.

The drive back to Barcelona was less eventful, mostly because I insisted on satellite navigation and a complete ban on goat-related distractions. I caught myself planning when we might return, already mentally blocking out dates, already forgetting how badly I had needed this nothingness. Gerald, I suspected, would not remember me at all. This seemed fair.

Some holidays you come back with stories of adventures, of sights seen and miles covered and achievements ticked off. I came back with slightly sunburnt shoulders, three unfinished books, and a profound expertise in doing very little at all. It turns out I am exceptionally good at it, given the proper setting and a complete absence of maps.