I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I tried to fill up the hire car with petrol and realised, three litres in, that I was pumping diesel into an unleaded tank. The chap at the Graz airport rental desk was far more understanding than I deserved, swapping the car with the weary patience of someone who has seen every flavour of British incompetence. By the time I finally pointed the new vehicle toward Hohentauern, my stomach was growling and my dignity was in tatters.

The drive into Styria proper began to soothe my nerves. Rolling hills gave way to proper Alpine drama, and somewhere near Judenburg I stopped at a roadside stall for a bottle of pumpkin seed oil and a bread roll that shattered gloriously with each bite. I ate it in the car park like a fugitive, oil dribbling down my wrist, and felt the first genuine flutter of holiday excitement.

Hohentauern itself appeared suddenly, a cluster of wooden houses and steep roofs huddled against the mountains. The chalet, when I found it, looked exactly as promised: solid timber, flower boxes still clinging to late colour, and that particular hush that comes from proper altitude. I fumbled with the key box, dropped the code sheet in a puddle, and eventually staggered inside with my bags and my bruised ego.

The kitchen was the immediate revelation. Not one of those holiday let kitchens where you are meant to pretend to cook while secretly planning every meal out, but a serious space with a proper hob, decent knives, and a balcony that looked directly toward the Tauern peaks. I unpacked my shameful airport sandwich supplies, felt immediately depressed by their inadequacy, and resolved to do better.

The village shop became my first port of call the following morning. It was smaller than my childhood newsagent's, but somehow contained everything necessary for a respectable life: local cheeses wrapped in waxed paper, speck that the owner sliced to my exact specification, eggs with actual straw still attached, and jars of honey from hives I could probably see from my balcony. I spent far too much and carried it home in multiple trips, feeling smug and slightly bankrupt.

That first evening I attempted a proper Styrian dinner. The pumpkin seed oil became dressing for a potato salad with diced speck, which I ate on the balcony with a glass of Zweigelt purchased from the same shop. The sun dropped behind the mountains in that theatrical Alpine fashion, and I sat there in my inadequate jumper, slightly too cold but too stubborn to move, feeling extraordinarily pleased with myself. The potato salad was arguably over-dressed, the wine slightly too warm from the car, but the combination of altitude and self-congratulation made it taste like the finest meal I had ever assembled.

The local pub, I discovered the next evening, was a five-minute stumble down the lane. Gasthof zur Post, all dark wood and regulars who looked like they had been born on their particular stools. I ordered a beer by pointing and received something dark and local that tasted of proper malt and patience. The menu ran to hearty staples: goulash with bread dumplings, roast pork with sauerkraut, Kaiserschmarrn for pudding that arrived in a portion sized for a family of four. I ate it all, obviously, and waddled home through the darkness feeling like a man who had discovered the actual purpose of holidays.

The market in nearby Judenburg became my Saturday ritual. I took to arriving early, coffee in hand from a stall that roasted on-site, and wandering between producers with my inadequate German and enthusiastic pointing. I bought vegetables that still smelled of soil, trout from a man who caught them himself, bread from a baker who clearly considered my attempts at conversation charmingly pathetic. Each week my kitchen experiments grew more ambitious and, occasionally, more disastrous. The trout incident of week two, involving a smoke alarm and an overenthusiastic butter baste, remains a sensitive subject. The neighbours were polite about it.

By my final days I had settled into a rhythm of market mornings, elaborate lunches on the balcony, and pub evenings where the staff greeted me with the resigned warmth extended to temporary regulars. I never quite mastered the local dialect, never produced a potato salad that matched the village restaurant's, and certainly never lived down the diesel incident. But I left with a suitcase of pumpkin seed oil, a liver that requested immediate retirement, and the certain knowledge that I had eaten my way through a proper Styrian autumn with the dedication it deserved.