I have never been so grateful to see a man in flip-flops holding a rope as I was when we finally found the Costa Rei holiday home. The sat nav had given up somewhere past Cagliari, and my other half's Italian, which he had confidently described as "passable" before we left, had collapsed into a series of increasingly desperate hand gestures at a roundabout near Muravera. We were lost, sweaty, and I had accidentally packed his swimming trunks in the checked luggage that the airline had thoughtfully sent to Frankfurt.

The man with the rope was Giovanni, the caretaker, who had been waiting two hours and had started drinking wine on our veranda in what I can only describe as a spirit of philosophical resignation. He spoke no English, which turned out to be the making of the whole fortnight. Within minutes he had roped my partner into helping him fix a wonky sun lounger, communicating entirely through grunts, thumbs up, and the occasional burst of what sounded like operatic complaint. They were like an odd couple in a silent film, and I sat on our little terrace with a warm beer, already knowing this was going to be different from our usual Center Parcs affair.

Giovanni came back every other day with some small excuse. A lightbulb that was definitely fine. A check on the outdoor shower that involved him standing in it fully clothed, turning slowly like a rotisserie chicken, then declaring it "perfetto" with water streaming down his face. He brought his wife Maria once, who took one look at my attempt at pasta al dente and spent the next three hours teaching me to make proper malloreddus in our tiny kitchen. She spoke rapid Sardinian dialect that even Giovanni struggled with, and communicated disappointment through a specific sharp intake of breath that I still hear in my dreams. When I finally got the ridges right on the gnocchi, she cried. Actual tears. I felt like I'd won Bake Off and the Olympics simultaneously.

The neighbours were a Dutch family who had been coming for fifteen years and had adopted local customs with the fervour of converts. The father, Henk, wore a traditional shepherd's cap and insisted on calling the supermarket "il supermercato" even when asking directions in English. His teenage daughter had fallen in love with a local boy who worked at the gelateria in Costa Rei village, and their courtship consisted entirely of him wordlessly handing her increasingly elaborate flavours while she blushed the colour of the local coral. Henk pretended to disapprove but kept finding reasons to pop down for a granita himself, returning with elaborate reports on the boy's "work ethic" and "respectful portion sizes."

The woman in the village bakery, whose name I never learned because everyone just called her "la signora," operated on a system of trust that would make a London shopkeeper weep. She would wave away my attempts to pay immediately, jotting purchases in a little book with my name misspelled differently each time. "Dovete vivere," she would say when I tried to settle up before our departure. You must live. I still owe her six euros and change, and I think about this more than I should.

Evening brought the old men to the village square, playing cards with the intensity of high-stakes poker despite there being no money involved and the cards being held together with elastic bands. One of them, Pino, took a shine to us after my partner incorrectly identified a bird and Pino spent forty-five minutes educating him with the help of a whistling demonstration that attracted actual birds. They thought he was one of them. He was not.

What struck me, sitting there with warm Peroni and the smell of someone's grill drifting across from three gardens away, was how much I'd been missing this. Not Sardinia specifically, though the turquoise water and that particular quality of light helped. I'd been missing the not-knowing. The being slightly incompetent and visibly foreign and having it not matter at all. Maria still sends me WhatsApp voice notes I cannot understand but always reply to with heart emojis. Giovanni has apparently asked after my "fortunato uomo" to three subsequent guests. I am slightly jealous of them getting to meet him first.

We left the car at the airport with sand still in the footwells and a jar of Maria's tomato sauce wrapped in a beach towel. My partner's Italian remains passable at best, but his gesture game is now genuinely impressive. I still cannot make malloreddus properly without hearing that sharp intake of breath, though I am trying. Some debts, I am learning, you do not actually want to settle.