I should have known the holiday was going to be characterful when my Sat-Nav decided "Plouarzel" sounded more like a sneeze than a destination and sent me down a single-track lane barely wide enough for a determined bicycle. There I was, in a hire car the size of a small boat, wedged between a hedge and a very unimpressed-looking cow, wondering if this was the sort of authentic Breton experience the brochure had in mind.

The mishap, of course, came when I finally found the cottage and attempted what I thought was a charmingly rustic entrance. I had spotted a side gate, all weathered wood and climbing roses, and decided this was definitely the sort of romantic arrival point a writer ought to use. I wrestled with the latch, gave it a hearty shove, and promptly tumbled into what turned out to be Monsieur Le Gall's vegetable garden. Not the holiday let at all. The actual entrance was the perfectly obvious gravel drive twenty metres further along. Monsieur Le Gall, who must be in his late seventies and was wearing a flat cap that had seen better decades, simply leaned on his hoe and regarded me with the patient expression of a man who had watched many British people do many stupid things.

"Anglais?" he asked, not unkindly.

I admitted this was so, brushing soil from my elbow and trying to look dignified.

He nodded slowly, as if this explained everything, then pointed his hoe handle toward the proper cottage. "La. Avec le portail qui fonctionne." There. With the gate that works.

I thanked him in my schoolboy French, which he received with the pained tolerance of a concert pianist listening to chopsticks. But then he did something rather wonderful. He reached into his pocket, produced a tomato the colour of a sunset, and pressed it into my hand. "Pour le diner," he said. "Pas pour jeter sur les choux." Not for throwing at the cabbages. I suspect this was his standard joke for trespassers, but I laughed anyway, and something in my embarrassment seemed to please him.

The actual arrival at the cottage was rather less dramatic, though the owner, a woman called Anne-Marie with a grey plait down to her waist and reading glasses perpetually perched on her forehead, had clearly heard about my approach. She greeted me with a smile that suggested she knew exactly which fool had been gallivanting through the neighbour's marrows.

"Did you meet Henri?" she asked, handing me a key attached to a piece of local sea glass.

"I fell into his garden."

"Yes," she said, with no surprise whatsoever. "He will tell this story for years. Come, I will show you the boiler, which is boring, and then I will tell you where to buy the good cider, which is not."

She was as good as her word. The boiler explanation lasted perhaps ninety seconds, after which she produced a hand-drawn map and began annotating it with the fierce concentration of a military strategist. The boulangerie where you must arrive before half past eight or Madame will sell your croissant to someone more punctual. The coastal path where her brother had once seen an otter, though he had been drinking pastis at the time so one could not be certain. The Tuesday market where a man sold oysters from the back of a van and would lecture you for twenty minutes about merroir if you made the mistake of asking a question.

I asked a question, naturally. About the difference between two ciders. Anne-Marie looked at me with something approaching respect.

"You will do," she said. "The man with the oysters is called Yves. Tell him I sent you, and do not mention the otter. He and my brother have not spoken since 2017."

She left me with the tomato, the map, and a peculiar sense that I had somehow passed an audition I did not know I was taking. The cottage smelled of woodsmoke and dried lavender, and through the window I could see Monsieur Le Gall resuming his hoeing, occasionally glancing across as if to check I had not launched another assault on his property.

I unpacked badly, made tea with water that tasted faintly of the region's granite, and sat on the small terrace as the evening light turned the hedgerows gold. A ginger cat appeared from nowhere, inspected me with evident disappointment, and settled on the step with its back to me. I suspect Anne-Marie had sent it to keep watch.

That first evening, I ate Monsieur Le Gall's tomato with nothing but salt and good bread from the boulangerie I would learn to reach on time. It was the best tomato I have ever tasted, though I cannot separate its flavour from the absurdity of how it came to me. I thought about how I had arrived expecting privacy and peace, the usual holiday promises, and had instead been immediately claimed by a small community of people who seemed to view strangers as raw material for future stories.

I rather liked it. I rather liked them. And I had the distinct feeling that by the end of the week, I would have acquired several more characters for this unexpected collection, whether I planned to or not.