Elsewhere, then. What about Croatia? Now there’s a top spot.

I once spent three nights in a house that had no number in a street with no name in a village on the Croatian island of Hvar that water and electricity only reached in 2001.

Hvar began its inhabited life as a haven for medieval pirates before being taken over by the Venetians in the thirteenth century, and not much has happened since.

There are 23 residents in the village of Rudine, and our host English Mark, a newfound friend of whom we are guests by virtue of being fellow English speakers, is by and large the only foreigner. The streets are unpaved and the houses made of crumbling stone, but the people are most embracing, although the village kids do have the alarming tendency to play in the dirt with guns that may or may not be toys, and local music tends to consist of romantic little ditties primarily concerned with lopping off the head of a Serb and offering it to your girl as a birthday present.

There’s no hot water (not that it’s really missed, because the heat is so oppressive), and certainly no chance of radio or telly, but by the same token there’s also no need to lock the doors at night, or set an alarm for the morning (the village rooster takes care of that).

Every evening at hourly junctures there’s an elderly village woman dropping by to see if there’s anything she can clean or cook for ‘Mister England’, who’s currently in the process of cultivating a work-related ulcer or two while tying up a property deal in Sarajevo (‘I’m sure it’s a beaut deal, Mr Tjyhgvgrybncjkvbic, and legal-ish, it’s just that I’ve never really known anyone before who owned a minefield…’).

Maybe I warmed to the place because of the way English Mark had fashioned his hedge into the shape of Roger Rabbit and the village kids loved it even though they’d never seen the cartoon. Or maybe it was just the place itself that got under my skin.