The ferry from Plymouth to Roscoff was mercifully calm, which I took as a good omen right up until the moment I confidently strode to the wrong hire car in the car park and spent ten minutes trying to wedge my suitcase into someone else's boot. The actual owner appeared with a croissant in one hand and a look of profound French confusion in the other. I apologised in three languages, none of them correct, and slunk off to find my actual vehicle three rows down.

The drive to Pleudaniel took about an hour, winding through countryside that looked like someone had painted it specifically to make me feel inadequate about my own garden. Fields of artichokes, hedgerows bursting with wildflowers, the occasional ancient stone cross standing sentinel at a crossroads. I kept pulling over to let tractors pass, which became something of a theme for the week.

I found the property down a narrow lane that my sat nav clearly considered more suggestion than instruction. Madame Lozach met me at the gate, a woman in her seventies with steel-grey hair cut practically short and hands that looked capable of building the stone house herself if required. She spoke no English and I speak French like a concussed toddler, yet we managed an elaborate pantomime about the septic tank, the boiler, and the neighbour's cat, which she described with a dismissive wave as "un voleur de saucisson." A sausage thief. I immediately liked her enormously.

She insisted on showing me the proper way to operate the shutters, which involved a specific wooden pole kept in a specific corner for specific reasons I never fully grasped. When I attempted to demonstrate my understanding, I nearly knocked a flowerpot through the kitchen window. Madame Lozach made a noise somewhere between a sigh and a chuckle, patted my arm with what I chose to interpret as maternal affection rather than pity, and departed in her ancient Renault with a toot of the horn.

Within the hour I met the sausage thief himself, a battered orange tomcat who sauntered across the courtyard, looked me up and down with evident disapproval, and helped himself to the chair I had just vacated. I considered this a territorial declaration and chose not to contest it.

That evening I walked to the village proper, perhaps fifteen minutes along a lane that smelled of honeysuckle and cow parsley. The boulangerie was closed, because of course it was, but the small bar-tabac was open and populated by three men playing cards with the intensity of high-stakes poker players despite there appearing to be no money involved. The barman, Yannick, had a magnificent moustache and the patient demeanour of someone who had spent decades explaining things to tourists. He poured me a demi of cider and, when I attempted to order in French, gently corrected my pronunciation of "Pleudaniel" itself. Apparently I had been saying it like someone sneezing.

The card players paused their game to contribute to my education. One, introduced as Jean-Claude though I suspect this was a joke since they all laughed, insisted on teaching me the proper Breton pronunciation, which involved sounds I am physically incapable of producing. Another, whose name I never caught but who wore a cap bearing the logo of a local agricultural cooperative, asked through Yannick's translation whether I had come for the sailing. I admitted I had come for the sitting still mostly. This struck them as hilarious, and Jean-Claude bought me another cider to celebrate my honesty.

Walking back in the fading light, slightly wobbly on the uneven lane, I passed an elderly man walking a dog that appeared older than both of us combined. We exchanged the traditional French nod, that small upward tilt of the chin that manages to convey both acknowledgement and mild suspicion. He asked if I was staying at Madame Lozach's place, which surprised me until I realised that in a village this size, my arrival had probably been discussed, assessed, and filed away before I had even unpacked my inappropriate number of shoes.

The house sat quietly as I approached, the sausage thief having apparently vacated my chair in favour of the windowsill, where he watched my return with the satisfaction of a landlord inspecting his tenant. I sat outside with a cup of tea made with the funny little electric kettle, listening to a owl somewhere in the trees and the distant sound of a tractor still working the fields. The mishaps of arrival already felt like necessary rituals, the price of admission to something unhurried and genuinely human. I had come expecting Brittany's famous coastline, the dramatic seascapes and ancient harbours. Instead I found myself captivated by these small encounters, these stubbornly particular people who seemed in no hurry to be anything other than exactly themselves. It was, I suspected even then, going to be a very good week indeed.