I have never been more grateful for a sat nav's passive-aggressive "recalculating" than I was driving down what I am fairly certain was a goat track somewhere between Aix-en-Provence and our holiday let in Moules. My partner, ever the optimist, had insisted we take the "scenic route." Three hours, one argument about whether that was a road or a dried riverbed, and a very close encounter with a tractor the size of a bungalow later, we finally spotted the stone walls of our mas.

The property sat nestled among vineyards that rolled away like a green and gold patchwork quilt, all sun-bleached shutters and climbing roses that had clearly never met a gardener they respected. I was still shaking gravel from my sandals when Madame Fournier appeared from next door, wielding a basket of figs and the kind of appraising look that suggested she had already catalogued every flaw in our parking technique.

"You came the back way," she said. Not a question. A verdict.

She thrust the figs at me before I could confess to our navigational sins. They were warm from the sun, split slightly at the seams, impossibly sweet. Within five minutes I knew about her late husband's opinions on British drivers, her grandson's dubious career in Marseille, and precisely which day the baker in the village made his proper fougasse. The rest of the week, she informed me, she would be watching to see if I watered her tomatoes correctly. I was apparently inheriting this sacred duty.

The baker himself, Monsieur Guerin, operated from a shop no larger than a generous cupboard. He had the build of a man who tested every batch personally and the moustache of a 1970s television detective. On our second morning he caught me staring at his olive bread with what I can only describe as longing. "You are the English at the old mas," he announced, again that peculiar French habit of knowing everything instantly. He refused my money for an extra pain au chocolat, declaring that Madame Fournier had already telephoned to say I looked like I needed feeding up. I ate it on a bench outside, watching village life perform its morning rituals, feeling suddenly and unexpectedly visible in a place where I had expected anonymity.

The most persistent character was undoubtedly Philippe, who appeared each evening to tend the pool with the solemnity of a man performing last rites. He spoke almost exclusively in proverbs, delivered with theatrical pauses while he tested chlorine levels. "In Provence," he told me on Wednesday, net poised mid-swirl, "we say the guest who arrives with a smile leaves with a friend. The guest who arrives with complaints leaves with mosquitoes." I laughed, then spent the next three days obsessively checking my optimism levels before approaching him.

By Friday I understood something I had not expected. These were not merely quirks of hospitality, not performative provincial charm for tourists. Madame Fournier's figs came from trees her grandmother had planted. Monsieur Guerin knew my order before I spoke because he knew Madame Fournier, and Madame Fournier knew because she watched, because that was simply what one did. Philippe's proverbs were not affectations but a language, a way of placing strangers within a continuing conversation that predated their arrival and would outlast their departure.

I had arrived exhausted, slightly bickering, expecting a private escape. Instead I found myself inserted into something communal, slightly exposing, rather wonderful. On our final morning Madame Fournier presented me with a jar of her tomato confit, sealed with the authority of a woman who had finally approved of my watering technique. "You will return," she stated. Another verdict, not a question.

Driving away, sat nav silent for once, my partner and I found ourselves recalculating nothing at all, simply following the road as it unwound through lavender fields still hazy with dawn, carrying the strange weight of having been, however briefly, someone's neighbour.