The SatNav had other ideas, didn't it. We'd been trundling up from Copenhagen Airport in our hire car, full of that smug holiday optimism, when the thing decided Vejby was apparently somewhere in the middle of the Oresund Strait. There we were, squinting at road signs in Danish, which might as well have been runes, while the voice calmly instructed us to "turn around where possible" for the fifteenth time. My partner suggested we just follow the coast. I suggested we throw the SatNav in the sea. We compromised on stopping at a petrol station somewhere near Helsingor, where I attempted to ask for directions in my GCSE German. The woman behind the counter looked at me like I'd asked where to buy a dragon.

"Vejby?" she said, switching to flawless English with visible relief. "You are close. But you took the scenic route, yes?" She said "scenic" in that particular Danish way that meant "you've gone wrong."

We found the place eventually, down a lane that felt increasingly like we were trespassing on someone's private thoughts. The cottage sat there in late afternoon light, all weathered wood and sensible Danish design, looking like it had been waiting for someone exactly like us to bumble along. I was still fuming about the SatNav, about my failed German, about the general indignity of being lost in a country where everyone speaks better English than I do.

That's when Bent appeared.

He came from the neighbouring property, which I later learned was his summer house, though "summer" seemed a generous term given he was there in late September wearing what appeared to be his father's father's wool jumper. He introduced himself with the confidence of a man who had watched countless holidaymakers arrive with that same dazed expression.

"You are the English," he stated, rather than asked. "I saw the car. Very small. English cars are small."

I started to explain about the SatNav, about the petrol station, about my linguistic crimes. Bent held up a hand.

"The machine is stupid," he said. "I have a machine. It tells me to drive through my own garden. I do not listen." He said this with such profound satisfaction, such settled wisdom, that I felt immediately both comforted and slightly pathetic.

He insisted on showing us the proper way to light the wood-burning stove, which apparently had "a personality." This involved a twenty-minute tutorial on draft angles and the specific temperament of local beech wood. His wife, Gitte, emerged at some point with coffee and a plate of something she called "evening bread," which was not bread in any English sense but rather an elaborate open sandwich situation involving pickled herring that I ate out of politeness and then genuinely wanted more of.

"Your first time in Zealand?" Gitte asked, and I admitted it was. She nodded as if this explained everything about us.

Bent told us about the village shop, which was also somehow the post office and the place to borrow books, run by a woman named Lene who had "opinions about cheese." He told us about the swimming spot down the lane, which he still used daily despite being seventy-three. "The water is honest," he said, which I wrote down mentally to ponder later.

By the time they left, the stove was purring, the strange sandwich was settling, and I was sitting in a Danish summer house with my partner, slightly stunned by how thoroughly we'd been collected by strangers. The SatNav sat dark and silent on the table. I didn't apologise to it, but I didn't throw it in the sea either. Some things, I was learning, you just accept and move on from. The cottage smelled of woodsmoke and something else, something like the particular generosity of people who have watched enough visitors arrive flustered to know exactly when to step in with coffee and unwanted directions. I was still lost, technically, but in a rather better way than before.