I have never been so grateful for a sat nav's patience as I was driving to Kirchheim in Hesse. The thing must have said "recalculating" a dozen times before I finally admitted I had taken the scenic route through somebody's farm. There I was, bumper deep in mud, waving apologetically at a chap in wellies who looked less surprised than I would have liked. He just pointed toward the village, muttered something about "Englander mit Technik," and went back to his chickens. I chose to take it as affectionate.

The cottage itself, when I eventually found it, sat at the edge of Kirchheim like a half-timbered promise of better decisions. Herr Muller met me at the gate, keys already jingling in his hand as though he had been waiting since morning. He was seventy if he was a day, dressed in trousers held up by what I can only describe as optimism and a leather belt that had seen the fall of the Berlin Wall. Within four minutes he had explained the heating, the bins, the neighbour's cat's dietary requirements, and his own opinion on British cooking. "You will eat properly here," he announced, which I took as both hospitality and a warning.

His wife, Frau Muller, appeared with an apple cake that could have ended wars. She spoke no English and I speak German like a toddler with a head cold, yet we managed a twenty-minute conversation about her sister in Darmstadt, the price of petrol, and whether I was married. She decided I needed feeding more than I needed a wife, which was probably fair. Herr Muller translated nothing, merely stood there looking vindicated about British cooking.

The neighbour appeared that evening, drawn by the light in the garden I suspect, though she claimed she was walking her dachshund. The dog had other ideas and immediately fell asleep on my foot. Fraulein Brandt was eighty-three, sharp as broken glass, and wanted to know everything about Brexit in exhausting detail. I gave her my best attempt at explaining, which she interrupted twice to correct my German grammar. "Your cases are terrible," she said, "but your politics are worse." She left with half my apple cake and a promise to return with her photo album from 1987, which apparently contains evidence of something important I had failed to ask about.

By day two I had become something of a village project. The baker, a round man named Klaus who wore the same brown jumper both mornings, refused my attempt at ordering in German and instead taught me the proper pronunciation through the medium of shouting slightly louder each time. The third attempt must have been close enough because he gave me a free pretzel "for courage." The woman in the pharmacy, when I mentioned a headache from Klaus's shouting, produced herbal tea and a lengthy lecture about Rhon mountain remedies that I understood perhaps forty percent of. She wrote the instructions down twice, once in German and once in what I think was her own private shorthand.

What struck me, sitting in that garden with Herr Muller's heating instructions finally deciphered and Fraulein Brandt's dog snoring through the fence, was how quickly strangers had folded me into their ordinary days. I had arrived a mud-splattered disaster with a useless sat nav and a talent for wrong turns. Three days later I had a baker who shouted at me with love, a neighbour who insulted my politics and fed me cake, and a pharmacy prescription for mountain herbs I would never properly identify.

The Hesse countryside is handsome enough in its rolling, forested way, but it was these small, stubborn, generous characters that made Kirchheim feel less like a destination and more like an accidental homecoming. I still cannot decline German nouns correctly. But I can say, with some confidence, that I know exactly where not to drive in Hesse, and precisely where to find people who will pretend not to notice.