In Venice, the buildings move. The people who live in them are well-used to this, have been for centuries. They made them out of pliable things - brick and wood and clay - that can shift with the waters around their foundations. It is in the midst of a rather overlong tour around the Doge’s Palace that we are shown a wonky door, 500 years old. Pushed back, it veers precariously from the floor. Pulled to, it fits in its frame perfectly. The secret is a curved bottom hinge: when the floor rises with the tide, the weather or the season, the door will still shut. “Yes, it is clever,” the guide says, with a bored acceptance that makes me laugh.

Because the buildings move there is brick dust on the many flights of stairs we climb to the dark little AirBnb we have rented for a few nights. The bed is hard. I raid the cupboards for blankets and extra duvets. It is cold up here, in the rafters, and I’m convinced the thermostat is lying. We have one good pillow between us and we share it, cocooned in this nest I have constructed out of necessity.

It is the first few days of December and gloomy for almost all of them. Venice is deserted. We get out earlyish, and are home to nap by 3.30pm. We have been working hard. The baby is growing. It is the ultimate indulgence, I think, to spend money on going on holiday and then allow yourself the time to sleep through it. When we go out again, it is dark and the streets are filled with water and empty of people. There are no roads on the island, and therefore no cars or street lights. The moon is a bright half, the stars visible. We walk through empty streets, letting our guts decide if it is time for cicchetti or hot chocolate or a cocktail. We wrap forks around squid ink pasta, use their prongs to coax clams from shells. We head home, in the quiet, with no plans for the next day.

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We have made a habit of going away in Advent before we were even properly together. We work in the arts. Autumns are always frenetic, a rush of activity and full diaries and missed evenings when everyone seems to be watching Strictly. A few days in December, then, is a kind of beacon. For a few days we can escape the Christmas mania, we can isolate our diaries from plans and preoccupations. We can nap and eat pasta and look at the little boats go by. I hurtle towards it, knowing that when I return the deadlines will ease, the emails will quieten down and people’s trees will start going up. People don’t go on holiday in December because their lives are busy and the weather is bad. I’d argue that this is exactly why it is a good time to go away: your life is busy, and tourist destinations are not.

Of course, I came back and there were still deadlines. I came back and we both became ill with that kind of illness that people say happens when you finally take a break. I came back and there were missed deliveries and emails and post on the doormat and a month of diary-juggling to negotiate. It takes more effort than booking a mini-break to properly stop with the onset of winter.

But it also takes less than booking a mini-break to pause at the beginning of December. I was taken to Church enough as a child for the Sundays of Advent to carry weight, mostly because they meant Christmas was on the horizon. Something from them, though, must have lingered. I find its residue in the need to retreat and sort and tidy, to make a kind of quiet when everything else is relentlessly loud. I suspect you do this too, perhaps in taking out the Christmas decorations box from wherever it lives the rest of the year, or in mixing the dry and the wet of a Christmas cake mixture, or in methodically writing the addresses of people you love, and have not seen enough, onto envelopes and putting a thick handful of them in the post. These are all their own kind of walk around a sometimes-busy city in the rain when nobody else is there. They’re a necessary breath before the exhale begins.