I have never been so grateful for a ferry toilet in my entire life. There I was, bouncing across the Baltic from Ystad to Ronne, having polished off a suspiciously large cinnamon bun, when I realised my phone - with the Sandvig cottage directions, the door code, everything - had slipped from my pocket and was currently sliding across the deck like it was auditioning for the Winter Olympics. I lunged. I missed. I nearly followed it into a lifeboat. A Swedish pensioner watched the whole performance without blinking, then calmly handed me my phone and said, "Danish holidays always start with a small drama, yes?" I decided then that Scandinavians are either psychic or simply accustomed to British incompetence.

The drive north to Sandvig took about forty minutes, winding through Bornholm's peculiar landscape of chunky granite fields and sudden, almost aggressive greenery. I kept expecting to feel disappointed - you know how holiday rentals can look heroic online then arrive to find a shed with aspirations - but rounding the bend into Sandvig itself, with those absurdly picturesque fishermen's houses huddled against the harbour, I actually laughed out loud. Mine was the yellow one. Of course it was yellow. With a red door. It looked like a child's drawing of a happy house.

The key safe defeated me for eleven minutes. Eleven. I have two degrees. A Danish woman cycling past with a basket full of what I later learned were freshly foraged chanterelles stopped, watched my struggle, then said without dismounting, "You must push up, not pull. The safe is optimistic, like most things here." She cycled on before I could thank her. I never got her name. I think of her constantly.

Inside, the cottage smelled of pine and something else - old books, maybe, or the particular mustiness of a place that has spent decades breathing sea air. The kitchen had a proper gas hob, the sort that makes you feel like a serious cook even if you're only heating tinned soup. I opened the back door and there was the terrace, those weathered wooden planks, and beyond them nothing but the Baltic glittering like someone had scattered broken glass across it. I stood there in my still-ferry-damp shoes and felt that particular holiday feeling that is three parts relief, two parts terror that you've forgotten something important, and one part wondering if you could actually live here forever.

I hadn't brought proper coffee. This is important. I am not a coffee snob at home - instant suffices, judge me - but something about that view demanded ceremony. I walked into Sandvig proper, which took four minutes, and found a small shop where a man with eyebrows like white caterpillars was arranging smoked fish with the precision of a museum curator. "You are the Englishman in Ingrid's cottage," he announced, though it wasn't a question. "She always rents to the dramatic ones." I asked what he meant. He just smiled and handed me a paper bag of something he called "proper Bornholm coffee" and refused my kroner. "Pay when you leave. If you remember." I remembered three days later, panicked, and he waved it off like I'd offered him a button.

That first evening, I sat on those weathered planks with my stolen-feeling coffee and watched a local fisherman mend nets on the harbour wall, occasionally shouting comments to a woman in a window that I couldn't understand but which made her laugh in a way that carried across the water. I thought about the ferry, the phone, the key safe, the chanterelle woman. I thought about how I had planned this trip to "get away from people" and instead kept finding myself collected by them, gently, like flotsam they were too polite to ignore. The sun did that Scandinavian thing where it simply refuses to set properly, hanging around the horizon like a guest who doesn't know when to leave. I didn't mind. I had nowhere to be, and for the first time in months, no particular desire to be anywhere else.