I have never been so relieved to see a wooden A-frame in my life. After six hours of driving from Copenhagen, a wrong turn that took us through what I am fairly certain was someone's beet field, and a spirited argument with our sat nav that I absolutely lost, we finally pulled up to the Marielyst holiday home in Falster. My partner was not speaking to me. I had suggested we "skip the motorway and see the real Denmark." The real Denmark, it turns out, involves a lot of very similar-looking agricultural flatness and precisely zero places to buy a lukewarm coffee.

The first person we met was Bent, who lived in the neighbouring cabin and appeared within approximately forty seconds of our arrival. He was seventyish, wearing sandals with socks in what I initially assumed was irony, and carrying a tupperware of pickled herring. "You are the English," he announced, which was not a question. He had apparently been watching for our car since morning, having memorised the registration from the booking website. I found this unsettling. My partner found it charming. This set the tone for our entire stay.

Bent insisted on showing us how to operate the outdoor shower, a procedure that required fourteen steps and involved a rubber mallet he produced from somewhere. "The water is heated by the sun," he said, tapping the black plastic tank with evident pride. "Sometimes." He then asked if we liked fishing, and before I could answer, he informed me that I had the hands of someone who did not like fishing. "Soft hands," he said, not quite approvingly. "My wife had soft hands. She hated fishing too. She is in Odense now." He said this with the same flat practicality he applied to the shower instructions, and I spent the next ten minutes unsure whether to offer condolences or simply nod.

His wife, it transpired, was visiting their daughter. I learned this from Gitte, who ran the little bicycle hire shack two minutes down the path and who appeared to function as the village's informal information network. She was eating the same pickled herring as Bent, which I later discovered was because they were siblings and conducted what seemed to be a low-grade feud about whose recipe was superior. "Bent's wife makes him do the pickling now," Gitte told me, leaning on her counter with the relaxed posture of someone who had nowhere else to be for the foreseeable future. "He puts in too much dill. He thinks he is subtle with the dill. He is not subtle." She said this loudly enough that Bent, still fiddling with our shower, could absolutely hear. He did not react. I suspected this was a performance they had perfected over decades.

Gitte refused to let me hire a bicycle until I had answered three questions about my intentions. Was I planning to cycle to the beach? Yes. Did I know the path had a deceptive dip? I did not. Had I considered that my "soft hands" might struggle with the brakes? Bent had apparently texted her. I did not ask how he had her number, or why the observation about my hands had warranted transmission. I simply accepted the bicycle with what I hoped was dignified gratitude.

That evening we walked to the local shop for supplies and encountered Jens, who was sitting on a bench outside with a dog that appeared to be part wolf and entirely uninterested in human interaction. Jens, by contrast, was extremely interested in ours. He wanted to know where we were from, what we thought of Brexit, whether we found Danish bread inferior to German bread, and if we had met Bent yet. "Bent will show you the shower," he predicted, correctly. "He showed me the shower in 1987. I remember the mallet." The dog yawned, and Jens interpreted this as agreement. "Even the dog remembers the mallet," he said.

By the time we returned to the cabin, my partner was speaking to me again, largely because we now had enough shared material to last several dinners. We stood on the little wooden deck with our mediocre wine and watched the light do that particular Scandinavian thing where it hangs around for hours, refusing to commit to actual darkness. Bent had left a note pinned to our door with further shower instructions, in case we had forgotten, and a small jar of what I assumed was his herring. The note was unsigned. It did not need to be.

I realised, standing there with my soft hands wrapped around a wine glass, that I had not thought about work once. This was partly because I had been too busy navigating the intricate social ecosystem of a Danish holiday village, and partly because there was something genuinely disarming about people who treated strangers with the same frank attention they applied to pickling fish. We had come for the beach, technically. We had come for the cycling paths and the fresh air and whatever else the brochure promised. What we had actually found was Bent and Gitte and Jens and the dog, all of them operating with a directness that felt, to my English sensibilities, almost aggressively kind.

The shower worked, eventually. The herring was, I am prepared to admit, probably too heavy on the dill. I cycled to the beach the next morning and absolutely did not anticipate the deceptive dip, though Gitte's warning echoed helpfully as I picked myself up from the path. My hands remained soft. Nobody seemed to mind.