I'd left Split airport with what I considered a decent grasp of Croatian geography. "Trogir Sevid," I'd told the car hire woman with perhaps too much confidence. "Lovely. Head towards Trogir, then keep going." She'd nodded, I now realise, in that universal manner of someone humouring a tourist who has no idea what they're talking about.

The sat nav had other plans. Within twenty minutes I was on a road that grew progressively narrower, then suspiciously unpaved, then actively hostile to vehicles with anything less than four-wheel drive. I found myself staring at what appeared to be someone's olive grove, wondering whether to reverse or simply abandon the car and start a new life among the trees. A man emerged from behind a stone wall, looked at my rental with the expression of someone watching a dog attempt algebra, and pointed wordlessly back the way I'd come. I reversed for what felt like three miles of humiliation, waving apologetically at a woman carrying a basket of laundry who didn't wave back.

The actual property, when I finally found it, sat on a small inlet between Trogir and Sevid proper, the sort of place where the sea laps against rocks with theatrical regularity. I was still flustered, still rehearsing my explanation to the car hire company about the mysterious olive grove incident, when I encountered my first proper local character.

Ante appeared from the neighbouring property as I was attempting to wrestle my suitcase from the boot. He was perhaps seventy, wearing a faded football shirt and what I can only describe as authoritative sandals. "You are lost," he announced, not as a question. I began to explain about the sat nav, but he held up a hand. "Everyone is lost. The British especially. You have a look." He tapped his own face, then mine, demonstrating something I didn't understand until later: the particular expression of a foreigner squinting at Croatian road signs.

He insisted on helping with the case, then insisted on coffee, then insisted on introducing me to his wife, Marija, who was hanging squid on a line in their garden with the methodical patience of someone who had done this ten thousand times before. "He brings everyone," she said, not looking up. "Last week, Germans. They were also lost." Ante nodded proudly, as if this were a community service.

Over the next few days, I found myself drawn into their orbit with the inevitability of a caught current. There was the morning I attempted to buy fish from a small boat that appeared in the inlet, only to discover the fisherman, Dragan, spoke no English and I spoke no Croatian beyond "hvala" and the numbers one through five, which proved useless for negotiating mullet. Ante materialised as if summoned, conducted rapid-fire negotiations, then presented me with the fish as though bestowing a knighthood. "You owe me rakija," he said. I owed him several rakijas before the week was out.

The property itself became a stage for these encounters. The terrace, with its view of the water, seemed to function as a local observation post. Passersby would pause, comment on the weather with the gravity of oracles, then drift on. An elderly woman named Kata appeared each morning with tomatoes from her garden, refusing payment, instead extracting detailed accounts of my breakfast habits. "English eat badly," she diagnosed after my third morning of toast. The following day she brought cheese, then bread, then something she described as "medicine for your stomach" that tasted of aniseed and regret.

What struck me, gradually, was how these interactions operated on their own timetable. Attempts to hurry them failed. Questions about practical matters - where to buy petrol, whether the ferry ran on Sundays - were answered through elaborate digressions about cousins in Australia, the quality of this year's figs, the specific shortcomings of various neighbours. I learned that Dragan's brother had opened a restaurant in Zadar that failed because of a dishonest business partner. I learned that Marija's mother had lived to ninety-seven on a diet of fish, olive oil, and stubbornness. I learned that Ante had played football for a local team in 1968, a season he remembered with the precision most people reserve for weddings or funerals.

There was a particular evening, perhaps my fourth, when I sat with Ante as the light faded over the inlet. He produced homemade grappa from somewhere, poured with ceremony, and asked what I did at home. I gave my usual answer about office work, screens, commutes. He listened with the polite attention of someone hearing about a mildly interesting weather pattern in a distant country. "And this makes you happy?" he asked. I found myself unable to answer immediately, which seemed to please him. "Good," he said. "Thinking is good. Too much thinking is Croatian problem. But some thinking, yes."

I thought about that conversation often in the remaining days. Not with any great profundity - the grappa saw to that - but with the gentle puzzlement of someone realising they've been observed more carefully than they realised. These encounters, these characters with their unsolicited tomatoes and their authoritative sandals and their absolute certainty that their inlet was the centre of something worth defending, had offered something I hadn't known I was missing: the pleasure of being slightly known, of becoming familiar enough to be teased, advised, fed things I hadn't asked for.

On my final morning, Kata appeared with a jar of honey. "For your bad English stomach," she said. Ante materialised to witness my departure, pronounced my driving "maybe less lost now," and presented me with a small bag of dried figs for the journey. I reversed carefully from the property, checking the sat nav three times, then twice more. The road was correct, the olive grove avoided. But some part of me, I realised, wouldn't have entirely minded another wrong turn, another encounter, another conversation that wandered where it pleased and ended where it chose.