I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I trusted Google Maps over my own eyes. There I was, barrelling down a single-track lane in rural Aquitaine, convinced the satnav knew a shortcut to our gite in Siorac-en-Perigord. It did not. It knew a route to someone's beetroot field, where I performed a seventeen-point turn while three elderly Frenchmen watched from a gate with the kind of silent, judgmental fascination usually reserved for public apologies.

By the time I actually found the place, a handsome stone cottage with a pool and a terrace that looked like it belonged on a postcard, I was ready to collapse into a deckchair and speak to nobody for a week. That plan lasted approximately four minutes.

Madame Fournier, who managed the property, appeared from nowhere like a particularly efficient ghost. She was seventy if she was a day, wearing a floral apron that had seen actual decades, and she insisted on giving me the full tour despite my protestations that I only needed the loo and a lie-down. She spoke no English. I speak schoolboy French at best, the kind that evaporates under pressure. We communicated in a strange hybrid of gestures, exaggerated facial expressions, and me accidentally saying "I am a pineapple" at one point, which she found hilarious. She patted my cheek and called me "le pauvre," which I choose to believe was affectionate.

The next morning I ventured to the village boulangerie, still half-asleep and wearing mismatched shoes. I only noticed when the man behind the counter pointed at my feet and said, "C'est la mode anglaise, peut-etre?" with a grin that suggested he would be telling this story for weeks. His name was Philippe, and he had run the bakery for thirty years, or possibly since the Napoleonic era. He refused to let me leave without trying his pain aux raisins, which he declared "pour le pauvre homme aux chaussures folles." I ate three. No regrets.

By day three I had become a minor celebrity in the village square. A man called Henri, who seemed to have no particular job beyond sitting on a bench with a small dog of indeterminate breed, waved me over every time I passed. He spoke rapid Perigord dialect that might as well have been Martian. We discussed, as far as I could tell, the weather, his dog's digestive troubles, and whether English people truly ate beans for breakfast. He seemed disgusted yet intrigued. The dog, Bernard, fell asleep on my foot. I took this as bonding.

The local market on Saturday was where the real theatre happened. I got into a lengthy conversation with a goat cheese vendor called Chantal, who had opinions about Brexit that she expressed with such passionate hand gestures that I genuinely feared for her display of tomme. She insisted I try everything twice, then sold me far more cheese than any reasonable person could consume in a fortnight. "Pour votre femme?" she asked. I said I wasn't married. She looked at me with enormous pity and threw in an extra piece for free. The French have a particular way of making generosity feel like a mild rebuke.

Evening brought the most unexpected character: a British expat called Nigel who had lived in the next hamlet for fifteen years and had apparently forgotten how to speak to fellow countrymen without translating himself into French mid-sentence. We met at the village bar, where he was arguing with the owner about the correct way to make a pastis. "You English," the owner said to me, "you come here, you drink, you argue, you never leave." He said it with warmth. Or possibly as a warning. With the French, you can never quite tell.

On my final morning, Madame Fournier appeared again to check me out. She produced a jar of her own walnut liqueur, pressed it into my hands, and said something that sounded like "reviens quand tu as appris a conduire." I choose to believe this was an invitation rather than a driving lesson recommendation.

I left with cheese in my boot, liqueur in my suitcase, and the distinct sense that I had not so much rented a cottage as accidentally joined a very small, very eccentric community. The pool was lovely, the terrace was beautiful, but it was the people who made the place what it was. Even Bernard the dog, who had definitely left something on my flip-flop that I only discovered at the Eurotunnel.

Some holidays you remember for the views. This one I will remember for being called a poor man by a grandmother, educated on goat cheese by a zealot, and adopted by a bench-sitting philosopher and his flatulent dog. I have already booked to return next year. I will be checking my shoes carefully.