The sat-nav had other ideas about how to reach Pernes-les-Fontaines, which is how I found myself wedged between a tractor and a very patient goat in what I later learned was someone's driveway rather than a road. Three beeps of apology and one slightly desperate reversing manoeuvre later, I finally spotted the stone walls and terracotta roof of our holiday let, tucked behind a curtain of plane trees that looked like they'd been standing guard since Napoleon was in short trousers.

I tumbled out of the car with that particular mix of elation and cramp you only get after a seven-hour drive, and immediately encountered Madame Bouchard from next door. She was watering her geraniums with the focused intensity of a woman conducting a military operation. "You are the English," she announced, which I suppose was fair enough given my parking attempt had already marked me as foreign and possibly unhinged. Before I could confirm or deny, she pressed a warm fig into my hand and informed me that the previous occupants had left the shower curtain "in a condition," then bustled off muttering about the heat and the general decline of everything since 1987.

The key was where the owner had promised, under a terracotta pot shaped like a frog that had seen better decades. I was fumbling with the lock when a voice drifted over the wall. "First time?" It belonged to a man in a faded blue boiler suit who introduced himself only as Philippe and who I would later discover spent approximately fourteen hours a day in his garden doing something mysterious with twine. He didn't elaborate on what the twine was for, and I didn't ask. Some mysteries are sacred. He did, however, offer the observation that the house had "good bones" and that the tap in the kitchen required "a certain touch," which he demonstrated with a wrist action I have since been unable to replicate.

Inside, the place smelled of lavender and old stone, that particular Provencal perfume that makes you immediately want to abandon your entire life and become someone who owns a lot of linen. I was busy having this very thought when I heard a knock at the door. It was a boy of perhaps ten, who introduced himself with formal precision as Etienne and informed me that his grandmother wished to know if I required eggs. I said that would be lovely, though I hadn't yet located the fridge. He nodded gravely, as if this were a standard obstacle, and returned ten minutes later with six eggs in a basket that had definitely seen actual chickens. "They are from yesterday," he said, which I took as a recommendation. His grandmother, he added, wanted me to know that the brown ones were "more serious" than the white ones. I have still not worked out what this means, but I treated them all with appropriate respect.

By evening I had met three more neighbours, each appearing with the suddenness of stage actors who'd been waiting for their cue. There was Jean-Claude, who walked a dachshund named De Gaulle and who spent twenty minutes explaining why the village bakery was acceptable but the one in the next commune was "for tourists and people without standards." There was a woman whose name I never caught but who communicated exclusively through gestures and the occasional meaningful sniff, and who conveyed her disapproval of my car's colour with devastating efficiency.

I sat out on the terrace as the light went that particular Provence gold, drinking something cold and local, listening to Philippe doing something rhythmic with his twine in the gathering dark. Somewhere a dog barked, probably De Gaulle, expressing an opinion about something. I thought about the eggs in their basket, the fig still warm in my memory, the shower curtain waiting to reveal its secrets. I had arrived nowhere in particular, in the best possible way, among people who had already decided what they thought about me and seemed prepared to tolerate my presence regardless. The sat-nav had been wrong about the route, but absolutely right about the destination.