The sat nav gave up on us somewhere between Saint-Brieuc and the middle of nowhere, which is how I found myself reversing a hire car down a single-track lane while a man in a flat cap watched from his gate with the expression of someone who had seen this exact scene approximately four thousand times before. I wound down the window to apologise and he just shrugged, said something in Breton that sounded roughly like "good luck," and wandered back into his garden. Welcome to Plehedel, I thought. We have arrived.

The stone cottage sat at the end of a gravel track, half-hidden behind a hedge that had not been formally introduced to pruning shears in several decades. My partner was already out of the car, stretching her legs and making that face she makes when she is pretending not to blame me for the sat nav situation. The key was apparently in a lockbox, which sounded straightforward until we discovered the lockbox had opinions about the code. Three attempts, two muttered swear words, and one small spider incident later, we were in.

The first thing that struck me was the smell. Old stone, woodsmoke from some previous occupant, and something green and growing that I later learned was the wisteria attempting to colonise the back wall. The second thing was the silence, broken almost immediately by a donkey braying from somewhere over the hedge. I brayed back, without thinking, because apparently that is who I am as a person. My partner looked at me with the weary affection of someone who has accepted certain fundamental truths about their life choices.

We had not brought groceries, which meant a trip to the nearest shop, a small supermarket in Plouha about ten minutes away. I say supermarket; it was more of a large shed with excellent cheese and a woman behind the counter who took one look at my attempt to ask for "deux baguettes" and switched immediately to English with the efficiency of a seasoned professional. Her name was Colette, she informed me, and she had worked there for thirty-two years. She knew everyone's business and seemed faintly disappointed that I had so little to offer. "English," she said, not unkindly, "in Plehedel. For the gite." It was not a question. She told me the previous occupants had been Dutch and had bought six bottles of cider on their first day. I bought eight, purely out of national pride.

Back at the cottage, we met our neighbour proper, the man from the lane, who introduced himself as Yannick and who turned out to be not merely watching our incompetence earlier but actively placing bets with himself about how long the reversing would take. He had lived in the village his entire seventy-odd years, he said, except for two years in Rennes which he described as "a phase" with the same gravity someone else might apply to a brief prison sentence. He talked for twenty minutes about the best time to collect mussels from the local cove, a conversation that somehow included his cousin's divorce, the price of diesel, and a detailed physical description of a fish he had caught in 1987. I understood perhaps forty percent of this, nodded enthusiastically throughout, and came away with a bag of tomatoes from his greenhouse that he insisted we take.

That evening, sitting in the small garden with Colette's cider and Yannick's tomatoes, I found myself reflecting on how thoroughly I had failed to be the sort of person who arrives smoothly, unpacks efficiently, and spends the first evening in cultured relaxation. The sat nav had died, I had conversed with a donkey, and I now possessed detailed secondhand knowledge of a Breton fish from three decades ago. My partner was laughing at something, the wisteria was doing whatever it was doing against the wall, and somewhere Yannick was probably telling someone about the Englishman who could not reverse. I raised my glass to him, to Colette, to the whole ridiculous business of finding yourself somewhere new and immediately becoming a small part of its ongoing story. The cider was excellent, by the way. I went back for twelve more bottles the next morning, and Colette did not look surprised in the slightest.