By the time we finally found Can Rosillo, I had already reversed into a lemon tree, spent twenty minutes arguing with a hire car satnav that seemed convinced Llucmajor was somewhere in the sea, and developed what I can only describe as a profound spiritual connection with the roundabout outside the Mercadona. My partner sat in the passenger seat with that particular expression of British stoicism that says, "I could have driven," without actually saying it.

The mishap that really set the tone, though, was the key. The lovely agent had left it in a lockbox with a code, simple enough, except I had written it on my phone and my phone had chosen that precise moment to update itself with the enthusiasm of a teenager discovering a new social media platform. Black screen. Dead as a doornail. There we stood, two slightly pink English people in thirty-degree heat, staring at a very attractive front door we could not open, surrounded by the faint scent of jasmine and our own mounting panic. I tried the code from memory, got it wrong three times, and was briefly convinced we would be sleeping in the hire car among the lemons I had already offended.

Mercifully, my partner had screenshot the instructions. She produced this evidence with the quiet satisfaction of someone who has been vindicated after years of being told she screenshots too much. The door swung open, and we stepped into what I can only describe as a small miracle of Mallorquin calm.

Can Rosillo sits in that blessed spot where you feel genuinely away from everything without being inconveniently away from everything. The pool glimmered at us with that particular Mediterranean blue that makes you wonder why you ever thought a paddling pool in a Bromley garden was acceptable. Terracotta tiles, white walls, the obligatory bougainvillea climbing somewhere it probably should not be. I dropped my bag, made straight for the nearest lounger, and did not move for approximately four hours.

That first afternoon set the template for the entire fortnight. I had brought three books, ambitiously, and actually finished one of them, which for me represents a personal best since approximately 2007. The others I used as sun shields, as props for my sunglasses, and occasionally as something to squint at before deciding that squinting was too much effort and closing my eyes was the superior option. My partner developed a routine of morning coffee by the pool, a gentle swim, then relocating to a different lounger for what she called "a change of perspective." It was the same perspective, slightly angled. We did not care.

The local exploration was equally unambitious, which was precisely the point. Sa Torre, the little village practically next door, provided a bakery where I attempted Spanish with the cheerful ineptitude of a man who once got a C in GCSE French and has apparently decided all Romance languages are essentially the same. They were patient. I got my ensaimada. That was enough. Some evenings we wandered down to the local restaurants in Llucmajor itself, no more than ten minutes in the car, and ate grilled fish and drank wine that cost less than a London pint, watching the square do its slow evening business of old men on benches and children on scooters.

There was a moment, perhaps day six or seven, when I realised I had not checked my work email, had not thought about the tube, had not experienced that particular London feeling of needing to be somewhere else slightly faster than was possible. I was simply existing in heat and light, turning pages occasionally, swimming when the temperature demanded it, eating tomatoes that tasted of actual tomatoes. It felt almost embarrassingly simple, this happiness. As if I had been running a race nobody had asked me to run, and had only just noticed I could stop.

We did visit the beach at Es Trenc one day, drove the twenty minutes or so, told ourselves we should do more such things, spent three hours there, and mutually agreed that actually the pool was superior because you did not have to carry things. This became our excuse for doing very little else. The tomatoes from the Llucmarket market. The afternoon siestas that stretched from two until four, from four until five, until the distinction between siesta and simply being awake in a horizontal position became academic.

On our final morning I sat by the pool with my coffee, watching a gecko make its deliberate way across the wall, and felt something close to grief at the thought of leaving. Not because Can Rosillo was spectacular, though it was lovely, but because it had permitted me to be spectacularly unremarkable for two weeks, and I had discovered I was rather good at it. The lemon tree, I noted, had survived my reversing. The satnav had not improved. My phone, fully updated, now worked perfectly, which seemed almost insulting.

We locked up, returned the key to its box with the correct code first time, a small victory, and drove away through the same roundabouts, past the same Mercadona, toward the airport and the particular madness of checking in a bag that was somehow heavier despite containing fewer things. I looked back once, at the dry stone walls and the distant shimmer of the sea, and made the usual promises to myself about holding onto this feeling, about bringing some of that slowness home.

I have not, of course. But I remember it, particularly on rainy Tuesday mornings, and that memory of doing almost nothing in the Mallorcan sunshine remains stubbornly, brilliantly vivid.