I should have known the Sat Nav was up to no good the moment it tried to send me down what looked like a goat track outside Clermont-Ferrand. Three hours from Lyon, four coffees deep, and there I was arguing with a disembodied voice about whether a field of Salers cows counted as a viable turning circle. The cows, I should note, were deeply unimpressed. One stared at me with the kind of judgment I usually reserve for my own cooking.

The mishap, though. Oh, the mishap. I'd stopped in a village no bigger than a postage stamp to buy bread, because I had this romantic notion of arriving at the gite with a proper crusty loaf and perhaps some local cheese, looking like someone who belonged in rural France rather than someone who thinks "terroir" is a type of yoga. I emerged from the boulangerie triumphant, baguette aloft, straight into the path of a market stall selling honey. The honey won. I spent the next twenty minutes sticky, sheepish, and being fussed over by an elderly woman who kept patting my arm and saying "pauvre petite" despite me being a six-foot man in my forties. She made me take three jars of her lavender honey as compensation. I still do not understand the logic, but I also do not argue with French grandmothers.

By the time I actually found the Grandrif, perched up in the hills with views that made me forget the honey incident entirely, I was ravenous and slightly hysterical. The place itself was exactly the sort of solid stone farmhouse you dream about when booking somewhere called a "Grandrif" in the Auvergne. Thick walls, wooden beams you could probably hang a small car from, and a kitchen that immediately made me want to cook something ambitious and almost certainly ruin it.

Which I did. That first evening, convinced I could channel my inner French peasant, I attempted a tartiflette using Reblochon from a farm shop I'd passed. The potatoes were underdone. The cheese seized up like it was personally offended. I ate it anyway, standing at the kitchen window, watching the light fade over the Puy de Dome and feeling peculiarly content despite my culinary failure. There's something about eating your own disasters in beautiful places that takes the sting out.

The local pub situation, or rather the auberge situation, became my salvation. Five miles down the road in a village I shall not attempt to spell, I found a place where the menu hadn't changed since approximately 1987 and the landlord looked at my phrasebook French with the patience of a man who has seen many Brits attempt to order "le steak" with misplaced confidence. I ate aligot there, that gloriously elastic cheese-and-potato concoction that basically requires a weightlifter's arms to serve properly. The chap at the next table, who turned out to be a local farmer, watched me photograph my plate with the weary tolerance of someone who has never once considered Instagramming his dinner.

The market in Ambert, which I reached after another navigational adventure involving a road that appeared to be made of wishes rather than tarmac, became my weekly pilgrimage. Fourme d'Ambert, that gentle blue cheese from the very hills around me, was everywhere. I bought too much, as one does. I bought saucisson that hung in my kitchen like culinary bunting. I bought vegetables from a woman who told me exactly how long to cook each thing, in the manner of someone issuing a binding legal judgment.

Back at the Grandrif, I slowly improved. A simple lentil soup with the local green Puy lentils, which need no showing off. A roast chicken that actually resembled food. One evening, slightly wine-happy, I even managed a decent cheese board with walnut bread and that bloody lavender honey, which turned out to be magnificent with Fourme d'Ambert. The farmer from the auberge would have been proud, or possibly horrified, but he wasn't there, so I awarded myself the validation.

On my final morning, I made coffee and sat outside with bread from that same boulangerie where my honey humiliation began, now spread with butter and apricot jam from the market. A Salers cow watched me from the neighbouring field. I like to think she remembered me, though probably not. I felt briefly like someone who could belong there, before packing my car with an embarrassing quantity of cheese and driving back toward Lyon, slightly heavier and significantly happier.