I should have known the holiday had truly begun when I managed to leave my sunglasses on the plane at Palma Airport. Not my passport, not my phone, but the one thing I would actually need within approximately forty minutes of stepping onto Majorcan tarmac. There I was, squinting like a confused mole, rummaging through my hand luggage while my partner made that particular face he reserves for my very special brand of travel competence.

The drive to Son Servera took about an hour, winding through countryside that already had me forgiving myself the sunglasses debacle. The Tramuntana mountains sat hazy in the distance, and everywhere you looked there were those impossibly perfect stone walls dividing fields of almond and olive trees. I kept pointing at things like I'd never seen vegetation before, which in my defence I hadn't, not really, not after eighteen months of looking at the same patch of London pavement.

Finding Can Safiro required a bit of concentration, tucked away as it is down a lane that grew progressively narrower until I became genuinely concerned we'd taken a wrong turn onto someone's private driveway. My partner was navigating with that mixture of confidence and complete guesswork that men seem to specialise in. We passed a small finca with chickens wandering about, and I felt the particular satisfaction of being somewhere properly rural, somewhere that hadn't been smoothed down for tourists.

The villa itself appeared suddenly, framed by mature gardens that clearly someone had loved for years. I will confess to a small gasp, which I immediately tried to disguise as a cough. The traditional stone exterior with its terracotta roof looked exactly as it had in the photographs, which is rarer in holiday lettings than you might hope. There was a covered terrace with wooden beams, and beyond it I could glimpse the pool glittering in that almost aggressive Majorcan sunshine that now had me shielding my eyes with my hand like a Victorian explorer.

The key was exactly where the property manager had said, in a little lockbox that I fumbled with for an embarrassing length of time. My partner stood behind me making helpful suggestions in a tone that was not, in fact, helpful at all. When the door finally opened, we were hit with that particular cool darkness of a well-built stone house, the kind that stays pleasant even when the outside world has become an oven.

The kitchen was immediately promising, proper size, not one of those holiday afterthoughts where you can't actually cook without performing an elaborate dance around another person. Terracotta tiles underfoot, wooden furniture that had actually been used rather than placed there by an interior designer with a Mediterranean Pinterest board. I found myself already planning a trip to the local market, already imagining tomatoes that tasted of something, which says everything about what London has done to my expectations.

I stepped out to the terrace again, blinking in the light, and there was the garden properly now. Mature fruit trees, a lawn that actually looked tended rather than merely surviving, and that pool catching the afternoon sun. A gecko darted across the wall and I felt something unknot in my chest that I hadn't realised was tight. The sunglasses mishap already seemed like it belonged to a different person, someone still stuck in the anxious logic of everyday life.

My partner appeared with two glasses of something cold and local, and we stood there in the particular silence of the Majorcan countryside, broken only by distant goat bells and the whir of cicadas. I thought about how I would describe this place to friends back home, and knew already that I would fail. Some things resist being turned into anecdote. Some things simply want you to be still inside them, at least for a little while.