I have never been so grateful to see a set of house keys in a lockbox in my entire life. Twelve hours after leaving Luton, there I was, standing outside a villa in Tossa de Mar, absolutely convinced I had booked a holiday to the wrong country. The sat nav had given up somewhere near Perpignan, my phone was on four percent, and I had just spent twenty minutes trying to open what turned out to be the neighbour's garden gate. The neighbour, a splendid chap in flip-flops and a vest that had seen better decades, watched the entire performance without saying a word. Only when I started kicking the gate did he wander over and explain, in Catalan that sounded suspiciously like Spanish but definitely was not, that my actual accommodation was two doors down.

The keys were exactly where the email said they would be. I just had not bothered to read the bit about the house number because, well, who expects two nearly identical villas on the same lane? Not me, apparently. Not me at twelve hours past my bedtime with a crick in my neck from budget airline seating.

But then I stepped inside, and something shifted. The place smelled of clean linen and something else, something warm and foreign that I later realised was just the sun having baked the terracotta tiles all afternoon. The living room opened onto a terrace through doors that stuck slightly, the kind of stick you get used to within a day and then miss when you are home. I wrestled them open with my shoulder and there it was: the garden, the pool catching the last of the light, and beyond the rooftops, a glimpse of the Mediterranean that made me laugh out loud. Actually laugh. The neighbour probably thought I had finally lost it completely.

I had not eaten since a sad airport sandwich at six that morning, so I did what any sensible person would do. I found the nearest supermarket, which in Tossa de Mar meant a charmingly compact Spar on a narrow street where I parked with approximately three millimetres to spare on either side. I bought bread that was still warm, cheese I could not pronounce, olives that were suspiciously cheap, and a bottle of wine that cost less than a London coffee. Back at the villa, I ate all of it on that sticky terrace door step, too exhausted to find a proper chair, watching the sky turn the particular pink that only seems to happen above Catalonia.

The mishap with the gate became funny almost immediately. That is the thing about holidays, is it not? The disasters become the stories before you have even unpacked. I sat there with my questionable cheese and my excellent wine, and I thought about how I had nearly cried at that wrong gate, how travel strips you down to your most ridiculous self, how twelve hours of minor indignities can dissolve into nothing with one view of the sea.

I fell asleep that night without drawing the curtains, which is something I never do at home. The morning sun woke me early, and I lay there for a moment forgetting where I was, then remembering, and smiling before my eyes were even properly open.