The sat-nav had been confidently sending us down ever-narrowing Istrian lanes for the best part of twenty minutes when I finally accepted that "turn left in three hundred metres" actually meant "abandon all hope, ye who enter this olive grove." My partner, ever the optimist, suggested we ask for directions. I, ever the British driver abroad, insisted we could work it out ourselves. This went on for another ten minutes of increasingly scratchy olive branches against the hire car paintwork before we encountered a gentleman in a faded blue boiler suit leaning on a fence.

"Krnjaloza?" he said, before I'd even properly wound down the window. Word evidently travels fast when foreigners are circling your village like confused moths. He gave us directions in a mixture of Croatian, expansive hand gestures, and what I later realised was perfectly good Italian that I'd been too flustered to process. We thanked him profusely. He waved it off, lit a cigarette, and watched us leave with the amused patience of someone who'd done this before.

We found the property ten minutes later, naturally having missed the turning he'd indicated and needing to double back past him again. He was still there. Still smoking. He raised his cigarette in what I choose to believe was solidarity rather than mockery.

The key holder, a woman called Marija with steel-grey hair pulled back in a practical bun, met us at the gate with a basket of figs and a look that suggested she already knew everything about our olive grove detour. She spoke rapid Croatian at first, then switched to German when my blank expression failed to shift, and finally landed on heavily accented but perfectly serviceable English with visible relief.

"You are the English," she said, not quite a question. "You like the small roads."

I admitted we perhaps liked them more than was sensible. She laughed, a proper throaty thing, and showed us round the property while explaining that her grandmother had grown up in this house, that her uncle still made wine from the vines we could see tumbling down the slope, and that we absolutely must not feed the neighbour's cat despite its persistent begging. The cat in question, a rangy tortoiseshell, had already materialised at my ankles with the timing of a seasoned con artist.

"The cat is liar," Marija said firmly. "She tells everyone she is starving. She is not starving. My neighbour is dentist. Very good salary."

She left us with the figs, a bottle of her uncle's malvazija, and strict instructions to find her if anything went wrong. "Anything," she repeated, with the emphasis of someone who had dealt with British plumbing confusion before.

That evening, having successfully opened the wine with a corkscrew that required three attempts and some muttered profanity, we sat on the terrace watching the light change over the rolling Istrian countryside. The dentist's cat had somehow acquired a small plate of cheese. I wasn't entirely sure how this had happened. My partner suggested, not unkindly, that I might be a soft touch.

I thought about Marija and her uncle's wine, the man in the boiler suit who'd probably spent his afternoon directing lost tourists, the way communities here seemed to operate on networks of observation and casual intervention that would send most British suburbanites reaching for their curtains. There was something gently humbling about being so obviously known, so quickly folded into a place's awareness. Back home I couldn't reliably name my next-door neighbour. Here, a stranger in an olive grove had already filed me under "English, likes small roads, needs watching."

The tortoiseshell cat leapt onto the wall and fixed me with an expectant yellow stare. I thought about Marija's warning. I thought about my grandmother, who'd have done exactly the same thing in this situation.

"You're a liar," I told the cat, and reached for the cheese.