I had been dreaming of olive groves and proper feta for months, so when my mate Dave said he'd found a place called Lygia Xylokastro in the Peloponnese, I booked it before I could pronounce it properly. That was my first mistake. My second was trusting Google Maps to navigate the winding coastal roads after a flight, a bus, and what felt like seventeen hours of travel.

The mishap came about twenty minutes from the property. I stopped at a petrol station to ask directions, because my phone had decided this particular mountain was a dead zone. I approached a chap filling up his ancient white pickup, practicing my phrasebook Greek in my head. "Signomi," I began, rather proud of myself. He turned, looked me up and down, and said in perfect Yorkshire-accented English, "You're lost, aren't you, love?" Turned out Brian had retired from Leeds twenty years prior and married a local woman. He'd been living in the village above Lygia ever since, growing oranges and avoiding British winters. He insisted on leading me there in his pickup, driving approximately four miles an hour so I wouldn't lose him, hazard lights flashing like we were in a funeral procession for a very unhurried person.

The property itself sat among low hills with glimpses of the Gulf of Corinth shimmering through pine trees. I was still laughing about Brian when I met Katerina, who managed the place. She was in her sixties, formidable, and wielding a watering can like a weapon. "You are the English," she announced, not as question but fact. "Brian telephoned. He said you are terrible at directions but seem harmless." She showed me round with the efficiency of someone who had done this thousands of times, pausing only to shout at a ginger cat she called "the Minister" for attempting to enter through an open window.

That evening I walked to the nearest taverna, perhaps ten minutes along a lane that smelled of wild thyme and woodsmoke. There I found Giorgos, the owner, who was arguing with an elderly customer about whether this year's olive harvest would beat his brother-in-law's. The customer, Spiros, had eyebrows like hedgerows and opinions about everything. He commandeered my table without invitation, declaring that a foreigner eating alone was "a tragedy of Greek proportions." By the end of the night I knew about his failed fishing boat venture in 1987, his wife's superiority at making hilopites, and his suspicion that Katerina's cat was actually a reincarnated politician.

The next morning I encountered Thanasis at a tiny shop selling honey and soap. He was perhaps seventy, wearing a flat cap indoors, and he spoke to me entirely in Greek despite understanding no English whatsoever. We communicated through gestures, samples of honey, and his occasional bursts of laughter at my attempts to mime "sunscreen." He pressed an extra jar of thyme honey into my hands, refusing payment, and said something that Katerina later translated as "he thinks you have the face of someone who needs more sweetness in their life."

I spent three days being absorbed into this small orbit. Katerina brought me tomatoes from her garden, still warm from the sun, and told me about her daughter in Athens who thought she was mad to stay. "She has air conditioning and stress," Katerina said, waving her hand dismissively. "I have the Minister and these hills. Who is mad?" Brian appeared each morning at the bakery where I went for spanakopita, always with some new observation about how Greeks had improved him or ruined him, he could never quite decide.

By my final evening, Spiros had promoted me to honorary member of his brother-in-law rivalry, Giorgos had named a dish after my apparent appetite, and Thanasis had taught me three words of Greek that I later discovered were actually village slang unsuitable for polite company. I sat on the terrace watching the light fade over the gulf, the Minister attempting to steal my olives, and realised something that made me slightly uncomfortable. I had arrived thinking I was escaping to solitude and scenery. What I had actually needed was this particular chaos of connection, these stubborn, generous, entirely unimpressed people who treated my foreignness not as novelty but as minor inconvenience worth overcoming.

Brian found me there and sat down uninvited, as was his way. "Sorted you out then, haven't they?" he said. I couldn't argue. I still couldn't pronounce Lygia Xylokastro properly, but I had learned something better: how to be found by people who had no particular reason to bother.