I should have known the Sat Nav was up to no good the moment it tried to send me through what looked suspiciously like someone's allotment. There I was, crawling along a lane barely wider than a wheelbarrow, convinced I'd find the main road round the next bend. Three bends later, I was staring at a very confused gentleman in overalls who was holding a watering can and looking at me as if I'd just landed from Mars. "Zadelsdorf?" he repeated, scratching his head. "You want the other direction. Past the church with the stork's nest. Can't miss it." I thanked him, reversed with the grace of a shopping trolley in a gale, and finally spotted the proper turning.

The cottage sat at the edge of the village, all timber framing and sensible German efficiency, with window boxes that looked like they'd been arranged with a spirit level. I was still laughing at my own navigation disaster when the door opened and out came Ingrid, who I'd later learn had lived next door for forty-two years and considered it her personal duty to know everything about everyone. "You found us then," she said, which in village speak clearly meant she'd already heard about the watering can encounter. Word travels faster than broadband round here.

Ingrid introduced me to her husband Klaus before I'd even got my suitcase out of the boot. He appeared from behind a shed, carrying something that looked like a cross between a strimmer and medieval farming equipment. "For the nettles," he explained, though I hadn't asked. "The English always want to know about the nettles." He wasn't wrong. Within ten minutes I'd been given a tour of his composting system, which he described with the pride most people reserve for grandchildren.

The key handover came from the owner, a woman called Petra who ran everything with the relaxed chaos of someone who'd done this a thousand times but still found it amusing. She kept forgetting where she'd put things, patting pockets and muttering in German, while Ingrid shouted suggestions from her garden. "Last week she lost the keys in the bread bin," Ingrid called out, entirely unhelpfully. Petra rolled her eyes with the practised weariness of someone who'd heard this story approximately six hundred times.

By the time I actually stepped inside the cottage, half the village seemed to have gathered. There was a teenage boy called Lars who'd been sent to fetch milk and had clearly found something more interesting, an elderly man whose name I never caught but who nodded sagely at everything anyone said, and a small dog of indeterminate breed who had appointed himself official greeter. Someone produced a bottle of something herbal and homemade. Klaus produced a second bottle, "for comparison purposes." The nettle conversation continued.

I kept thinking they'd disperse, leave me to unpack in peace. Instead, Ingrid started telling me about the previous guests, a Dutch couple who'd tried to barbecue in a thunderstorm, and Klaus produced photographs. Actual printed photographs. The whole gathering shifted slightly to examine the evidence of charred sausages and heroic stubbornness, and I found myself drawn into the kind of communal storytelling that happens in places where people still have time for strangers.

It was only when the church clock struck some hour I wasn't expecting that everyone suddenly remembered appointments, dinners, television programmes. They melted away with the efficiency of people who'd perfected the art of organised sociability. Ingrid pressed a jar of her husband's honey into my hand. Klaus reminded me about the nettles. Petra found the keys in her jacket pocket, exactly where she'd left them.

I stood in the doorway of the cottage, suitcase still in the car, surrounded by the faint smell of herbal liqueur and someone else's cooking, and realised I hadn't even noticed the timber framing or the window boxes or any of the things I'd actually booked. The place already felt less like a holiday let and more like somewhere I'd accidentally become part of, if only for a week. I went inside, found the kettle, and spent a solid ten minutes trying to work out the German plug sockets before giving up and going back out to ask Ingrid. She was waiting on her step, I suspect deliberately, thermos already in hand.