I'd driven from Athens Airport with the sort of confidence that only comes from having watched someone else do something once on television. The hire car was too large, the sat nav had given up around the port of Agia Marina, and I had approximately forty-seven minutes of ferry-induced seasickness still swirling behind my eyes. Skroponeria, I kept telling myself, was meant to be a quiet fishing village on Evia's western coast. How difficult could quiet be to locate?

The mishap, when it came, was almost impressively stupid. I'd stopped at what I believed to be the property, marched up to a man tending his olive trees, and announced in my finest phrasebook Greek that I was here for the holiday home. He'd looked me up and down, scratched his considerable beard, and led me not to a charming stone villa but to his sister's house, where I was promptly seated at a kitchen table and presented with coffee so strong it practically introduced itself. Twenty minutes of broken conversation passed before I realised my error. The actual villa was three doors down. The man's name was Dimitris, and he found the whole thing so amusing that he insisted on walking me there personally, carrying my smallest suitcase and narrating the neighbourhood gossip as if I were a long-lost relative finally returned.

The villa itself, when we reached it, was exactly the sort of place that makes you forgive yourself for being an idiot. Whitewashed walls, a terrace that seemed to hover directly above the water, shutters painted that particular blue that only exists in Greece and perhaps in the dreams of people who have never been. But it was the people, not the property, that settled me in.

Dimitris introduced me to his wife Eleni before he'd even let me unpack. She appeared from behind a lemon tree with a bowl of figs and a expression of permanent, gentle amusement at the world. She spoke rapid Greek at me, seemingly unconcerned that I understood perhaps one word in ten, and somehow conveyed through gesture and sheer force of personality that I was to eat the figs immediately and that the tomatoes in her garden were superior to anything I had ever known. She was not wrong about the tomatoes.

That first evening, I found myself at the village's single taverna, drawn by the sound of a television playing football at considerable volume and the smell of something involving octopus. The owner, a man called Spiros with eyebrows like hedgerows, took my order by simply bringing me what he felt like cooking. This turned out to be grilled sardines, a salad of cucumber and onion, and bread that had been baked that morning by his mother, who was ninety-three and still rose at four o'clock to fire the oven. He told me this not in response to any question, but as a general statement of principle, as if her sleeping habits were simply something that needed to be known about the village, like the depth of the harbour or the quality of the light.

An Englishwoman at the next table, clearly a regular, leaned across to inform me that Spiros had been telling people about his mother's baking schedule since approximately 1987. Her name was Patricia, she had retired here from Birmingham twelve years ago, and she had opinions about everything that she delivered with the cheerful certainty of someone who had long ago stopped worrying about being wrong. She thought I was brave for driving myself. She thought the figs were early this year. She thought Dimitris had probably enjoyed my confusion immensely, because Dimitris enjoyed everyone's confusion, it was his primary form of entertainment.

I walked back to the villa that night with the sort of fullness that comes from food you did not choose and company you did not seek out. The stars were doing that thing they do in places without light pollution, where they seem almost aggressive in their abundance. I thought about how I had arrived here by mistake, by misreading a map and misjudging a distance and misidentifying a stranger's house as my own. And yet the mistake had been the introduction. Without it, I would have been a tourist with a key code and a self-catering kitchen. Instead, I was someone who had been fed figs by a woman who gardened in her good dress, who knew about a ninety-three-year-old's sleeping habits, who had been laughed at and then laughed with by a man who had nothing better to do on a Tuesday afternoon than rescue idiots from their own incompetence.

I sat on that terrace and listened to the water move against the rocks below, and I understood something I had been too busy to notice before. The journey had not been the point, and neither was the villa, lovely as it was. The point was that I had finally stopped trying to get somewhere, and in that stopping, had arrived exactly where I needed to be.