Right then, let me tell you about our little jaunt to the Condado De Alhama Golf Resort in Murcia, because the journey alone deserves its own chapter. We'd been driving from Alicante airport for what felt like three hours but was probably forty minutes, my partner navigating with the confidence of someone who'd glanced at Google Maps once, and me in the passenger seat clutching a bag of duty-free crisps like a comfort blanket. The sat nav cheerfully announced we'd arrived at our destination, and there we were, parked outside what was unmistakably a supermarket loading bay, nowhere near any holiday apartments whatsoever. Turns out I'd typed the resort name into the booking app correctly but somehow managed to transpose two digits in the postcode when programming the car. We are, I should mention, both in our forties. This sort of thing shouldn't happen anymore, and yet here we are.

By the time we actually found the proper entrance, I was ready to eat my own arm. The resort itself emerged through the palm trees like a mirage, all neat terracotta roofs and that particular hush that comes from wide open spaces and an abundance of golf carts. Our apartment was on the ground floor with a small terrace overlooking one of the fairways, and I immediately understood why people come here to self-cater properly. The kitchen was surprisingly well-equipped, not one of those holiday rentals where you're expected to boil an egg in a teaspoon. Proper pans, a decent knife, and a fridge that actually got cold. I opened it with the reverence of someone discovering treasure.

The first evening, we walked to the small commercial centre near the resort entrance, a ten-minute stroll that became fifteen because I kept stopping to read menus. There's a handful of restaurants there, nothing flashy, just the sort of places where locals and holidaymakers mix without either group looking embarrassed. We ate at a tapas bar where the patatas bravas arrived swimming in a sauce that made my eyes water pleasantly, and I ordered a second plate before I'd finished the first. My partner had grilled sardines, which he ate with the concentration of a man performing surgery, picking out tiny bones and looking faintly betrayed by each one.

The next morning, we drove to Alhama de Murcia's weekly market, which takes over the town centre on certain days with a chaos I find genuinely thrilling. I am not, by nature, a morning person, but there's something about Spanish market culture that drags you out of bed. We bought tomatoes that smelled like actual tomatoes, which sounds obvious but isn't if you've been surviving on supermarket produce back home. Proper jamon from a man who shaved it so thin you could read through it. A wheel of queso de Murcia, the goat's cheese that's slightly sharp and perfect with bread. I also bought a kilo of apricots because they looked beautiful and spent the rest of the week trying to eat them before they turned to mush in the fruit bowl.

Back at the apartment, I attempted a paella. I say attempted because I was working with a standard frying pan rather than a proper paellera, and I got overexcited about the saffron. The result was edible, just, though the rice at the bottom achieved a texture somewhere between crispy and outright burnt that my partner diplomatically called "authentic socarrat." We ate it on the terrace with a bottle of Jumilla red that cost less than a fiver, watching someone in bright yellow trousers search for their golf ball in the rough below. I felt genuinely content, which is not an emotion I experience often enough to recognise immediately.

The small supermarket at the resort became my daily pilgrimage. Limited stock, of course, but I grew weirdly attached to its rhythms, the same woman always on the till, the same slightly wilted coriander in the chiller. I made increasingly elaborate attempts at Spanish cooking with increasingly basic ingredients. One evening I produced a tortilla that actually flipped successfully, a moment of triumph I documented with three photographs and sent to my mother, who replied "lovely" without any apparent enthusiasm.

We did venture to a restaurant in the nearby village one night, a proper family place where nobody spoke English and we pointed at things hopefully. I ended up with a stew of rabbit and snails that I hadn't anticipated but thoroughly enjoyed, once I'd stopped looking for the snails' little faces. My partner played it safer with grilled pork and spent the meal making satisfied noises that attracted attention from neighbouring tables.

By the end of the week, our fridge contained the sad remnants of overambitious shopping: half a limon, some manchego going hard at the edges, a jar of olives we'd optimistically thought we'd finish. I made one final attempt at a Spanish-style breakfast, frying the last of the chorizo with eggs, eating on the terrace as the early golfers began their rounds below. The burnt paella, the flipped tortilla, the rabbit I hadn't ordered, the apricots I'd eaten too many of in one sitting and slightly regretted. It wasn't perfect, any of it, but it was ours, and I think that's rather the point of self-catering holidays. You bring back memories along with the slightly embarrassing photographs and the determination to buy a proper paella pan that you'll probably never use.