I should have known the holiday was going to be interesting when I tried to get into someone else's hire car at Alicante Airport. In my defence, it was the same shade of uninspiring grey, and the man inside looked just as confused as I felt. Five minutes of rummaging through a stranger's glovebox later, I found my actual vehicle three rows down, hiding behind a pillar. My girlfriend just stood there with her sunglasses on, pretending she didn't know me. We've been together eight years. She has a lot of practice at this.

The drive to La Manga Club took about an hour, winding through the sort of Spanish landscape that makes you feel like you're in a car advert. Mountains in the distance, orange groves flashing past, the occasional goat giving you a look of profound disappointment. I had the windows down and was doing my best impression of someone who could afford a convertible. My girlfriend was navigating, which mainly involved telling me I'd missed the turning approximately four seconds after we'd passed it.

La Manga Club sits on a strip of land between the Mar Menor and the Mediterranean, and arriving there feels a bit like discovering a secret. You turn off the main road and suddenly there are palm trees everywhere, immaculately kept gardens, and the kind of hush that only exists in places where people have come specifically to do nothing. Our apartment was in one of the lower complexes, nothing flashy but with a terrace that looked out towards the golf course. I don't play golf. I find it both impressive and slightly threatening that people voluntarily walk that far in that much heat. But I do appreciate a good view, and this was excellent. Green and peaceful and very far from my usual Tuesday morning of staring at spreadsheets and wondering where my life went wrong.

The first thing we did was absolutely nothing. Proper, committed nothing. We dragged two sun loungers onto our terrace, opened the bottle of wine we'd bought at the airport, and just sat there. The afternoon sun was warm without being oppressive, and somewhere in the distance someone was splashing about in a pool in that lazy, unhurried way that only happens on holiday. I read three pages of my book and then fell asleep with it on my face. This would become a recurring theme.

The Mar Menor is a strange, wonderful thing - a huge lagoon of warm, shallow water that's apparently got therapeutic properties. I'm not sure about all that, but I can confirm that floating about in water warmer than your bath while the sun does its thing is genuinely restorative. We walked down to one of the nearby beaches on our second day, a gentle stroll that took perhaps twenty minutes through the complex and down towards the shore. The beach was quiet, just a few families and some serious-looking retirees with proper hats and crossword puzzles. The water was so flat it looked like you could walk across it. I waded in up to my knees and immediately felt like a more relaxed version of myself.

We developed a routine without ever discussing it. Mornings on the terrace with coffee and pastries from the little shop on site, afternoons by the pool or wandering to the beach, evenings cooking simple things in the apartment and eating outside as the light faded. One evening we walked to the nearby commercial area, a small cluster of restaurants and bars that felt pleasantly low-key. No one was trying to sell us shots or drag us into clubs. People were just eating and chatting and watching their children chase each other about. We had grilled fish and too much bread and watched a spectacularly mediocre sunset that was still better than anything I'd seen in months.

I did attempt one game of tennis on the courts there. I am not good at tennis. My girlfriend is worse, but she has the advantage of not caring. We spent forty minutes hitting balls into the surrounding bushes and laughing like idiots. A proper player on the next court watched us with the expression of a man who had seen things. We bought ice creams afterwards and agreed that we were definitely the sort of people who played tennis now. This was a lie, but a comfortable one.

What struck me most was how quickly the urge to do things faded. At home, I'm always planning, always feeling like I should be somewhere else or achieving something. Here, the greatest ambition was finishing my book or finding a slightly different spot by the pool. I walked to the local supermarket one morning, a proper Spanish one with mysterious meats and excellent tomatoes, and felt genuinely pleased with myself for the rest of the day. Small victories. Small everything, really, and that was the point.

On our last evening, we sat on the terrace with our final bottle of wine and watched the golfers finishing their rounds in the golden light. I thought about the hire car incident, and the tennis, and all the pages I'd slept on. I thought about how I'd worried before coming that a week of doing very little might feel wasted, might leave me restless and bored. Instead, I felt something close to reset. Not transformed, not suddenly wise, just slightly more myself than I'd been in a while. My girlfriend reached over and took my hand without looking at me. Neither of us said anything. There wasn't anything that needed saying.

The journey back was uneventful, which was almost disappointing. I didn't try to get into anyone else's car, though I did spend an embarrassing amount of time trying to work out why the key wouldn't open the boot before realising it wasn't our car at all. Old habits, apparently, die hard.