I had convinced myself that driving onto the ferry at Puttgarden would be the stressful bit, but no, my real downfall was a sat nav that decided "Marielyst" sounded enough like "Maribo" to send me twenty minutes inland towards a lovely lake and absolutely no holiday cottage. There I was, parked outside a petrol station in what felt like the flattest, most potato-field-dense corner of Denmark, arguing with a woman called Lene about whether I was "quite close actually" or "lost as a herring in a hayfield," which I am fairly certain is not a Danish expression but she made it sound official enough.

By the time I found the actual place, a tidy little cluster of wooden cottages near the beach, I was in that special state of mild hysteria where everything becomes either hilarious or deeply moving. The key was in a lockbox. The code worked on the third attempt. I stepped inside, smelled pine and cleaning products, and promptly sat on the sofa for a solid ten minutes doing absolutely nothing except being grateful I was no longer driving in circles past sugar beet farms.

The next morning I met Bent. Bent was seventy-something, permanently in wellingtons despite the dry weather, and occupied the cottage two doors down with a small dog called Minister, which Bent explained was short for "Prime Minister" because the creature "does nothing and expects everything." We discussed this at length while I attempted to operate the communal barbecue, which Bent regarded with the scepticism usually reserved for unproven quantum physics. He had opinions about my fire-starting technique. He had opinions about my sausage selection. By the time I had produced something edible, Bent had produced three cans of Tuborg from his own fridge and a running commentary on everyone who had stayed in my particular cottage since 1987.

"Swedes in eighty-nine," he said, as if this explained something fundamental about the universe. "Very quiet. Too quiet. You could hear them thinking."

I could not tell if this was praise or criticism.

The beach itself was a five-minute wander, that particular sort of Baltic shoreline where the water looks bracing and the sand has a satisfying squeak underfoot. I went there to recover from Bent, who had followed up his historical briefing with unsolicited advice about my car's tyre pressure. A woman called Gitte was collecting amber with a long pole, methodically, meditatively, the way some people do crossword puzzles. She showed me how to spot the proper stuff versus the bits of yellow plastic that wash up from who-knows-where, and told me she had been coming to this same stretch since her grandmother brought her in the sixties. Her grandmother, apparently, had also collected amber, and had once found a piece with a spider inside that she sold to a museum in Copenhagen for "enough to buy a very small car, but still, a car."

I found nothing with spiders. I found a piece of yellow plastic and felt briefly accomplished anyway.

Evenings in Marielyst have a particular rhythm. The light lasts forever in summer, that soft northern glow that makes you feel you should be doing something profound with your time while you mostly just grill more sausages and wonder if you should have brought warmer trousers. I took to sitting outside with a book I never quite finished, which became an elaborate performance for the benefit of anyone passing, particularly Bent, who would slow his dog-walk to assess my page number with visible judgement.

On my final morning I met a younger couple, Rasmus and Sofie, who were attempting to erect a windbreak with the grim determination of people who had paid money for it and would therefore master it. We collaborated. We failed. We collaborated differently. The windbreak stood, eventually, at a slightly apologetic angle, and Sofie produced coffee from a thermos that she insisted was "just normal coffee, nothing special," which of course meant it was excellent, because Scandinavians have standards about these things that I simply do not.

I left Marielyst with amber I could not authenticate, a slightly sunburned nose, and the certain knowledge that Bent would tell the next arrivals about my barbecue technique with the same archival precision he brought to everything. There is something particular about places where people return, year after year, where the cottages are modest and the conversations are not. I had arrived lost, slightly frantic, arguing with technology in a petrol station car park. I left, I think, somewhat found, or at least found enough to know that I would probably take the wrong turning again next time, and that someone would be there to notice, and to comment, and to hand me a can of beer while they did.