I should have known the Sat Nav was up to no good the moment it tried to send me through a field just outside Lille. Three hours of driving from Calais, my partner dozing in the passenger seat with a half-eaten bag of wine gums in her lap, and suddenly we're bouncing down what I can only describe as a tractor's idea of a shortcut. The cottage, when we finally found it tucked behind Cambrai's outskirts, looked mercifully solid. Stone walls, shutters that had seen better centuries, and a light on in the window that suggested someone was either expecting us or plotting a murder.

Madame Fournier, who owned the place, turned out to be the former. She emerged from the neighbouring house before I'd even finished wrestling my suitcase from the boot, wiping floury hands on an apron that had probably been her grandmother's. "You took the scenic route," she said, which in French-accented English managed to sound both sympathetic and deeply amused. I admitted the Sat Nav had betrayed me. She nodded as if this happened daily, which perhaps it did.

The cottage itself was one of those converted farm buildings that smell permanently of woodsmoke and old apples. Madame Fournier talked us through the boiler with the patient resignation of someone who had explained it four hundred times. "It is temperamental," she said, patting it like a difficult horse. "Like my husband, before he went to live with his sister in Arras." She delivered this as a simple fact, neither seeking sympathy nor offering context. I found myself wanting to ask more, sensing an entire novel in that sentence, but the moment passed.

By evening we were desperate for proper food and ventured to the nearest bar-tabac, a place called Le Coq d'Or that looked unchanged since the miners' strikes. The barman, Thierry, had a moustache that deserved its own postcode and opinions about beer that he shared unprompted. I ordered a demi of something local; he poured it with theatrical disapproval and launched into why English people always chose wrong. "You want the blonde," he insisted, already pulling it. "The amber is for philosophers and depressives." When I admitted to occasional philosophical tendencies, he laughed so hard his moustache quivered.

An older man at the corner table, who introduced himself simply as Marcel, decided we needed educating about Cambrai's proper significance. Not the First World War stuff, he waved that away, though the memorials are everywhere if you want them. No, he meant the belfry, the textile history, the canal that once made this place wealthy enough to argue with bishops. He spoke in bursts of passionate French that Thierry occasionally translated, sometimes accurately I suspected. "He says you have honest faces," Thierry offered at one point, though Marcel's gesture suggested he'd said something more anatomical.

What struck me, nursing that excellent blonde beer while my partner chatted with Madame Fournier's daughter who'd appeared with bread recommendations, was how immediately we'd become temporary locals rather than tourists. Nobody asked what we did in England or whether we knew London. They wanted to know if we'd tried the fromagerie in the morning market, whether we understood the boiler's moods, if we were aware that the church bell rang seven minutes late by design. "The priest in 1847," Marcel explained, "he could not wake up. So they changed the clock."

Walking back through streets that felt properly dark, not merely unlit, I realised something about myself I'd rather not admit. I travel assuming I'll be anonymous, observing from a safe distance. But places like this, people like these, they don't permit it. They pull you in with floury hands and unsolicited beer opinions and stories about lazy priests. The mishap with the Sat Nav, which I'd resented bitterly at the time, had become the introduction I needed. Without it, I'd have arrived efficient and unchanged. Instead I arrived ridiculous, navigationally humbled, ready to be claimed by strangers.

The boiler gurgled companionably when we returned. I patted it, feeling something like affection.