The thing about driving on the wrong side of the road in Sardinia is that you tell yourself it'll be fine, you've done it before, you're a seasoned traveller. Then you find yourself trying to change gears with the door handle for the third time in ten minutes, sweating through your linen shirt, while a man on a scooter the size of a lawnmower overtakes you with theatrical patience. I was still giggling at myself when I pulled up to the little stone house in Orosei, half-convinced I'd accidentally booked a shed.

The property sat tucked between two larger buildings, all weathered ochre walls and green shutters that looked like they'd survived every summer since Mussolini. I was fumbling with the key safe, muttering British apologies to no one in particular, when a voice came from above. "You are the English? You look lost already." An elderly woman leaned from a first-floor window, silver hair escaping a bun that had probably been perfect at six that morning. She introduced herself as Maria Pia and informed me, with evident satisfaction, that she'd watched three previous guests try the same key safe for twenty minutes before calling for help. I made it in eight. She seemed almost disappointed.

The interior was cooler than I'd expected, terracotta floors and white walls that smelled faintly of rosemary and old plaster. I dumped my case and went in search of coffee, which is how I met Tommaso. He ran the bar on the corner, though "ran" suggests more organisation than the place actually demonstrated. He was arguing with a coffee machine that appeared to be older than Maria Pia, thumping it rhythmically while singing something operatic under his breath. "It understands violence," he explained, without looking up. "Gentle people get no espresso here." The coffee was excellent. I went back three times that first day, each time receiving a slightly different performance and a lecture on some new topic: why British people drink tea "like punishment," the proper way to eat pecorino, his cousin's failed marriage to a German.

By evening I'd wandered down to the old town, narrow streets where locals sat on plastic chairs outside their doors like theatre seats arranged for the passing show. A man called Giovanni, who I later learned was Maria Pia's brother, waved me over with the confidence of someone who'd never once considered that a stranger might refuse. He was eating sunflower seeds and spitting the shells into a precise pile, discussing football with a teenage boy who responded entirely in shrugs. "You are staying in the small house," Giovanni announced, rather than asked. "My sister watches everyone. She knows your business before you do." He found this hilarious. I thought of Maria Pia at her window and felt pleasantly observed, like a minor character in someone else's long-running sitcom.

The mishap came later, when I attempted to buy bread for breakfast. I'd memorised "un pane, per favore" with the seriousness of a student sitting finals. The baker, a severe woman called Rosa with flour permanently worked into her forearms, listened to my delivery with mounting concern. "You want a pair of pants?" she asked, in slow, horrified Italian. I'd said "pantaloni," apparently, not "pane." The queue behind me, three elderly men and a boy with a football, found this the funniest thing they'd heard all month. Rosa gave me the bread anyway, plus a small cake "for the Englishman who cannot dress himself properly." I ate it walking home, laughing at my own ridiculousness, feeling already that this was how holidays should begin: slightly incompetent, thoroughly entertained, and already known by name to people who hadn't needed to ask.