I have to tell you about the absolute chaos of getting to our holiday let in Zadar, because it rather set the tone for the whole fortnight. We'd flown into Split, hired a car that smelled suspiciously of wet dog, and I'd confidently told my partner I'd navigate us there using nothing but instinct and a screenshot of Google Maps. Reader, we ended up in a village forty minutes in the wrong direction after I misread "Zadar" for "Zaton" at a roundabout. A man selling watermelons from a tractor trailer took pity on us, laughed for a solid minute at my pronunciation, and drew us a map on the back of a cigarette packet. We arrived at the stone house well after dark, me white-knuckled from narrow coastal roads, my partner refusing to speak to me until she'd had a swim.

The pool was glorious even by torchlight, I must say.

But it was the next morning that the place really came alive, and entirely because of the people. Our neighbour, an elderly woman called Ruza who lived in the adjoining house, appeared at our garden wall at half six with a bowl of figs and a look that suggested she'd been watching our arrival with some concern. She spoke no English, I speak approximately twelve words of Croatian, and yet we managed a twenty-minute conversation about her grandchildren in Zagreb, the quality of this year's olive harvest, and whether my partner was "too skinny" and needed feeding. She kept reaching over the wall to pinch my arm approvingly, as if confirming I met some local standard.

The property manager, a cheerful chap called Dino with a magnificent moustache, turned up later to check we'd survived the night. He found me attempting to work the outdoor grill with the confidence of a man who'd never grilled anything more complex than a cheese toastie. Rather than judge, he spent forty minutes teaching me the proper Dalmatian way with fish, which apparently involves a lot of olive oil, patience, and not touching the thing every thirty seconds like a nervous parent. He told me about his brother who'd moved to Birmingham for work and came back "talking funny and drinking tea at all hours." He said this with genuine bewilderment, as if tea were some exotic ritual.

The local shop, a tiny konoba five minutes walk away, became our morning ritual partly for the coffee and partly for the owner, Ante, who ran it with his son. Ante had opinions on everything and shared them freely regardless of whether we understood. He'd gesture at the sea, declare something emphatic about the weather, and his son would translate with weary affection: "He says only idiots swim before eleven, but you English do what you want." We went every morning. By day six, Ante was setting aside a particular pastry he thought we'd like, and his son had given up translating entirely, just smiling and shrugging.

There was a fisherman too, older chap called Luka who cleaned his catch each evening at the small harbour nearby. I made the mistake of admiring his octopus one evening, and that was it - I was committed to a fifteen-minute tutorial on proper preparation, complete with demonstrations of how to tenderise it against a rock. "You," he said, pointing at me with a small hammer, "you would ruin it. I can tell." He wasn't wrong. He gave me a fillet of seabream anyway, refusing payment, and told me to ask Dino about grilling it properly this time.

I kept thinking about that watermelon man, and Ruza's morning inspections, and Ante's cheerful insults. I'm not someone who normally chats to strangers; I'm the person who avoids eye contact on the Tube and considers that a successful commute. There's something about that particular stretch of Dalmatia though, something in the way people lean on walls and wait for you to be ready to talk, that undoes all that London conditioning. I found myself looking forward to the conversations I couldn't fully understand, to the gestures and the laughter at my terrible pronunciation, to being the slightly confused foreigner rather than the competent professional I pretend to be at home.

By the end, Ruza was bringing us her homemade rakija, which stripped several layers from my throat and made my eyes water. She cackled with delight. Dino checked on our grill progress with genuine investment in our improvement. Even Luka nodded approvingly at my fish preparation, though he still wouldn't trust me with octopus.

We left with a bag of figs, a bottle of suspicious rakija, and a list of Croatian phrases I mostly couldn't pronounce. My partner drove us back to Split, navigating properly this time, while I dozed in the passenger seat feeling slightly melancholy and surprisingly proud of my burnt shoulders.