I should have known the holiday was going to be characterful when I got my first Danish lesson from a petrol station attendant in Kolding. I'd stopped to ask for directions to Hejlsminde, having confidently ignored my sat nav for the last ten miles on some misguided notion that I "knew a shortcut." The attendant, a wiry chap called Bjarne with eyebrows like two caterpillars having a disagreement, looked at my scrap of paper, looked at me, then spent a solid five minutes explaining that I'd been driving in precisely the wrong direction. "You English," he said, shaking his head with what I can only describe as fond exasperation. "Always so sure. Like Vikings, but lost."

The actual property, when I finally found it, sat right on the coast near Hejls with that particular Scandinavian modesty that makes you feel immediately at home. But it was the people who made the place, not the view. My first morning, I wandered down to the little harbour hoping to find a cup of coffee and perhaps not make a complete fool of myself. I achieved neither.

An elderly woman called Grethe was feeding scraps to a one-eyed cat she referred to as her "husband's spirit animal," though she later admitted her husband was alive and well, just very fond of napping. She took one look at my attempt to order "en kaffe, tak" and switched immediately to English, but with a twist. She would only speak to me in questions. "You think this weather is good for walking?" "You have boots that will not leak?" "You know why that boat is painted yellow?" I never did find out about the boat. We sat for forty minutes while she told me, entirely through interrogatives, the complete history of Hejlsminde's fishing cooperative, which apparently collapsed in 1987 due to a disagreement about cod quotas that still divides families.

That afternoon I met Jens at the local shop, a man who stocked seventeen varieties of pickled herring and nothing else that could reasonably be called lunch. He insisted I try three of them, standing there with his arms crossed like a particularly stern judge while I made appreciative noises around fish that tasted increasingly like they'd been pickled during the Napoleonic Wars. "You are making the face," he observed, not unkindly. "The English face. We see it often." He gave me a fourth variety for free, "to educate you properly."

The gentle self-reflection came later, sitting on the property's terrace with a cup of tea that Grethe had somehow materialised without my asking. I'd arrived with all these notions of Danish reserve, of cool Nordic distance. Instead I'd found Bjarne's eyebrows, Grethe's interrogative storytelling, Jens's herring inquisitions. I'd been so busy expecting a certain kind of place that I'd nearly missed the one actually in front of me, with all its peculiar, generous, slightly oddball inhabitants. The mishap with directions hadn't been an interruption to the holiday. It had been the introduction to its actual theme.

My last morning, the one-eyed cat appeared on my doorstep with what I choose to believe was a look of farewell evaluation. I still don't know why that boat was yellow. Some things, Grethe had implied with her final question, are not for outsiders to understand. Not yet, anyway. Perhaps next visit.