I have never been so grateful to see a set of wind turbines in all my life. There we were, my partner and I, crawling along the A39 towards Lokken after six hours of driving from Aalborg airport, when I made the executive decision to ignore the sat nav and follow what I called "a more scenic route." What I actually followed was a farm track that deposited us in a field of very unimpressed-looking sheep. The turbines, visible from the main road, became our lighthouse. We backtracked with the dignity of two people who definitely knew what they were doing, obviously.

By the time we pulled up to the Lokken Strand, I had developed what I can only describe as a profound respect for Danish road signage and a slight twitch in my left eye. The cottage sat there all butter-yellow and smug, looking like it had never once led anyone astray. A woman was leaning on the neighbouring fence, watching our approach with the patient expression of someone who had seen this exact scene approximately four hundred times before.

"German?" she called out, before we'd even opened the car doors.

"English," I admitted, already bracing myself.

She nodded slowly, as if this explained absolutely everything about the sheep field. "I am Birgit. I have lived here since before your motorway was a dream in someone's head." She said this not with pride, exactly, but with the comfortable authority of a person who considers herself part of the local infrastructure. She informed us that the key was in a crab pot round the back, that the hot water took precisely four minutes, and that if we needed anything, she would be in her greenhouse "talking to the tomatoes." They were better conversationalists than most tourists, she added, with a glance that suggested we had our work cut out for us.

The tomatoes, it turned out, were merely the opening act. The next morning, determined to redeem myself after the sheep incident, I ventured to the bakery in Lokken proper. The man behind the counter had the build of a retired fisherman and the moustache of someone who had strong opinions about engineering. He looked at my attempt to order two rundstykker with the pained patience of a language teacher confronting a particularly trying student.

"You want the brown ones or the ones with the seeds?" he asked, in English that was far better than my Danish deserved.

"Brown, please."

He selected two with enormous care, as if choosing delegates for a peace conference. "You are staying at the yellow house? The one Birgit watches?" When I confirmed this, he actually laughed, a sound like gravel in a cement mixer. "She watched me grow up. She watched my father grow up. She will watch you, too. Do not do anything interesting." He handed over the bread with a look of genuine concern. "She has binoculars."

He was not wrong. That afternoon, sitting on the little terrace with our coffee, we spotted Birgit in her greenhouse. She was not, strictly speaking, looking in our direction. She was also not, strictly speaking, not looking in our direction. We waved. She raised her trowel in what might have been acknowledgement or might have been a warning.

The chap who delivered our firewood two days later was called Knud, and he arrived with a wheelbarrow and a dog the size of a small horse. The dog immediately investigated our rental with the thoroughness of a building inspector, while Knud told us about his grandfather, who had built half the holiday cottages in the area during the 1960s. "This one," he said, patting the wall affectionately, "he built for a woman from Copenhagen who wanted to paint the sea. She painted twelve paintings. All terrible. But she was happy." He considered this. "That is the important thing, I think. To be terrible at something and happy."

I have thought about that a great deal since. There is something about this stretch of coast, about the wide grey North Sea and the constant wind and the sand that gets into absolutely everything, that strips away any pretence of competence. I was terrible at navigating, terrible at Danish, probably terrible at being observed by Birgit. But I was, by the end of it, rather happy.

On our last evening, we took a bottle of wine to the fence line and invited her over. She came, eventually, with tomatoes and a sceptical expression. We talked, or rather she talked and we listened, about the way the village had changed and not changed, about the Germans who came in summer and the Swedes who came in winter, about the particular quality of light in October when the tourists had gone and the place returned to itself. "You were not the worst ones," she conceded, as the sun went down and the turbines turned slowly in the distance. "You were not the best ones either. But you were here. That is something."

It was, I realised, probably the most generous review I had ever received.