I should have known the holiday had truly begun when I managed to leave my sunglasses on the kitchen table at home, despite walking past them three times while checking I'd locked the back door. Three flights of stairs, two hours on a cramped budget flight, and a rental car with air conditioning that wheezed like my uncle after Sunday lunch later, we finally pulled into Campos. I was squinting like a mole in July.

The drive from Palma airport had been straightforward enough, though I'd taken a wrong turn somewhere near Llucmajor and found myself behind a tractor doing approximately four miles an hour. My partner, ever patient, suggested we simply "enjoy the scenery." I suggested the tractor driver might enjoy moving slightly faster than continental drift. We compromised by opening the windows and accepting our fate.

Finding Can Cuquet itself proved another small adventure. Campos is one of those proper Mallorcan towns where satellite navigation becomes more of a vague suggestion than a reliable tool. We circled the same roundabout twice, each time spotting what looked like our turning only to discover it led to someone's driveway or, on one memorable occasion, a field of very judgmental sheep. By the time we located the correct lane, I'd developed a nervous twitch every time the GPS announced it was "recalculating."

Then we turned through the gates, and something shifted. The dusty stress of the journey simply stopped mattering.

Can Cuquet sits among fields that stretch out in that particular golden-green shade you only seem to find in Mallorca, where the light does something different to the colours. The finca itself is built from that warm honey-coloured stone the island does so well, with terracotta roof tiles that have clearly weathered many summers. It looks settled, comfortable in its own skin, like a place that has long since stopped trying to impress anyone and simply exists as itself.

I stepped out of the car and immediately committed my second rookie error of the day, forgetting that Mediterranean heat doesn't announce itself gradually. The wall of warmth was absolute and immediate. My partner, who had actually remembered both sunglasses and common sense, stood smirking by the boot while I fanned myself with a parking ticket.

The owner had left the key in a sensible lockbox and included a handwritten note that managed to be genuinely welcoming rather than merely functional. Small touches, but after a day of automated check-ins and impersonal service elsewhere, it mattered. The kitchen smelled faintly of lemons and whatever cleaning product leaves that particular clean-but-not-chemical scent. Someone had left a bowl of local apricots on the counter, slightly warm from the sun, and I ate one standing at the sink without properly unpacking, juice running down my wrist like a child.

I wandered through to the terrace while my partner dealt with luggage, because I am apparently that person now. The pool caught the afternoon light in that way that makes you want to abandon all plans indefinitely. Beyond it, nothing but fields and the distant suggestion of hills. No other buildings pressing close, no traffic noise, just the particular silence of countryside that isn't truly silent at all, full of insects and birds and the creak of something wooden in the warmth.

I thought about my sunglasses, still sitting uselessly in London. I thought about the tractor, and the roundabout, and the sheep. Then I ate another apricot, accepted that some battles are not worth fighting, and decided that squinting in paradise remains, definitively, squinting in paradise.