I have never been so relieved to see a compost bin in my life. Three hours of driving from Billund, two missed ferries because I insisted we had time for a petrol station hot dog, and one spectacular argument with a sat nav that clearly had it in for me, and there we were: Mommark, Als, Denmark. Or rather, there our car was, half on the gravel drive, half in a decorative shrub, while I tried to work out if the key safe code was 7421 or 7241 or perhaps just a cruel prank.

The cottage itself, a traditional Danish summerhouse with weathered wood and windows that seemed to wink at you, sat looking out towards the Little Belt. But I barely noticed the view. I was too busy being watched by a man in a neighbouring garden who was holding a pair of secateurs like he was considering whether I needed pruning.

"First time?" he called out, not moving from his rhododendron.

"Is it that obvious?"

He laughed, a proper belly laugh, and introduced himself as Henrik. Within five minutes he had explained the heating system, the best angle for the outdoor shower, and the fact that the previous guests had been a family of Germans who had left behind an impressive collection of board games and a single flip-flop. "The flip-flop is now part of local legend," he said, deadpan. "We call it the Lost Sole."

Henrik's wife, Birgit, appeared with coffee and a plate of something she called "kransekage" which turned out to be a tower of almond-based construction that I demolished with embarrassing speed. They had been coming to Mommark every summer for forty years, they told me, ever since Henrik's father won the house in a card game that no one fully understood the rules of. "He was very drunk," Birgit explained, as if this clarified everything. "Danish tradition."

That evening, determined to make amends for my shrub-based parking, I walked down to the small harbour. A group of locals were gathered around a table made from an old cable reel, playing cards and drinking something from thermos flasks that smelled strongly of something medicinal. One of them, a woman called Lene with spectacular grey hair and a fleece covered in nautical badges, waved me over with the confidence of someone who had never once worried about social boundaries.

"You are the shrub man," she announced. "Henrik sent a text. We have been waiting."

I spent the next two hours losing spectacularly at a card game I still cannot name, drinking coffee that could have stripped paint, and learning that Lene had been a ferry captain for thirty years, that her brother knitted his own socks for fishing, and that absolutely everyone had an opinion on where I should buy my morning bread. "Not the supermarket," said a man called Preben, who had not spoken until this point and then delivered this verdict with the gravity of a judge. "The bakery in Sønderborg. Worth the drive. Life is too short for bad bread."

On the walk back, slightly dizzy with caffeine and defeat, I found myself laughing at nothing in particular. There was something about these encounters, these unhurried conversations with strangers who treated my incompetence as entertainment rather than nuisance, that felt like a gentle reproach to my usual rushing about. I had come to Als for the scenery, for the promise of coastal walks and quiet evenings. What I had not expected was to be folded so quickly into something like community, however temporary.

The next morning, I found a single flip-flop on my doorstep. A note in block capitals read: "For the legend. Welcome to Mommark." I still do not know who left it. I still have it, sitting on my windowsill at home, a ridiculous souvenir of a place where I arrived as a stranger and left, somehow, as the shrub man with a Lost Sole of his very own.