I have never been so relieved to see a goat in my entire life. There I was, halfway up a dusty track on Hvar island, convinced our hire car was about to slide backwards into the Adriatic, when this shaggy old thing wandered out from an olive grove and stared at me with what I can only describe as deeply judgmental eyes. I took it as a sign to keep going. First gear, prayers, and a lot of swearing under my breath.

The journey from Split had been straightforward enough - ferry, sunshine, that lovely feeling of leaving mainland worries behind - but the final stretch to our holiday home near Vrisnik tested my navigational pride something rotten. The sat nav gave up entirely, leaving us with handwritten directions from the owner that mentioned "the bend where someone's painted a fridge blue" and "don't trust the second gate, it's a trick." I am not making this up. We found the blue fridge eventually, though I still maintain it was more turquoise.

Our first evening, we wandered down to the nearest konoba, which I shall not name because the owner, Branko, would only shrug and say people never spell it right anyway. He was already outside when we arrived, perched on a plastic chair that looked older than me, feeding scraps to a cat with one eye and fewer teeth than you'd hope. Within thirty seconds he had established I was English, my partner was useless at football, and that we absolutely must try his grandmother's rakija. There was no menu. There was only Branko, and what Branko decided you were having.

I made the mistake of mentioning I worked in marketing. Branko's friend Dario, who appeared from nowhere with a crate of fish, found this hilarious. "Marketing!" he bellowed, as if I'd confessed to professional clowning. "My cousin does marketing in Zagreb. Sells tractors to Germans. Very stressful. You want wine?" The wine came in unmarked bottles. The fish came grilled with nothing but lemon and salt and somehow tasted like everything I had ever imagined the Mediterranean could be. Dario told us about his daughters in Split, his ex-wife's new husband ("idiot, but rich, so fair play"), and his theory that all of England's football problems could be solved by eating more octopus.

By the second night, we were regulars. Not through any planning - there simply wasn't anywhere else within walking distance, and besides, Branko would have been offended. A woman called Mira started appearing each evening with her knitting, sitting in the corner and interjecting into conversations with devastating timing. She had lived in Vrisnik her entire seventy-odd years, except for one winter in Stuttgart that she refused to discuss beyond calling it "a misunderstanding." She told my partner his Croatian pronunciation was "cute, like a baby seal," which he has decided to take as a compliment despite my suggestions otherwise.

What struck me, and what I keep thinking about now I'm back in rainy England, was how quickly these strangers became the architecture of our holiday. The property itself was lovely - stone walls, proper shutters, that particular silence of olive groves at dawn - but it was Branko's stubborn refusal to let us pay on the first night, Dario's terrible jokes about British tourists, Mira's quiet corrections of his facts, that made the place feel inhabited rather than merely visited.

I am not someone who normally chats to strangers. My default setting is politely avoidant, the classic headphones-in-supermarket approach to public life. Something about the scale of Hvar, the narrowness of those tracks, the way everyone seems to know everyone and therefore extends that assumption to you, wore down my defences entirely. By day four I was discussing someone's cousin's wedding as if I had been invited. By day six I was genuinely disappointed that the goat from our arrival didn't reappear for a proper goodbye.

We left early on the last morning, catching the first ferry. Branko had insisted on giving us coffee at six in the morning, which he made with the grim determination of a man who views sleep as a personal failing. "You come back," he said, not as invitation but as statement of fact. "Next time, you stay longer. Maybe you learn some Croatian words that aren't wrong."

I am already planning when we might. Not for the beaches, though they were glorious. Not even for the rakija, though my liver might disagree. For the particular pleasure of being somewhere small enough that a stranger feeding a one-eyed cat becomes, briefly, your daily ritual. For Mira's knitting-needle commentary. For Dario's terrible advice. For the goat, obviously. Always for the goat.