I should have known the holiday was going to be characterful when I got my hire car stuck in a sheep traffic jam three miles from Torre dei Corsari. There I was, sweating profusely, window down, trying to explain in GCSE Italian to a shepherd named Beppe that I was very sorry but I genuinely did not know how to reverse up a narrow Sardinian lane without ending up in a ditch. He leaned on his crook, looked at my British plates, and said something that sounded deeply unflattering but was probably just practical advice. His dog, a rangy thing with one ear permanently folded back, regarded me with the same weary disappointment.

Beppe eventually waved his flock past with theatrical slowness, each sheep pausing to give me the side-eye. I arrived at the apartment complex forty minutes late, still trembling slightly, to find the caretaker, Signora Fenu, waiting with her arms crossed and a cup of coffee going cold. She was seventy if she was a day, dressed head to toe in electric blue, and she did not accept my apology. Instead she inspected my car for scratches, made a noise like a disappointed kettle, and led me to my flat without a word.

The silence lasted until she noticed my still-damp shirt. "Sheep," I explained, pointing vaguely toward the hills. Her face transformed. She threw her head back and laughed, a proper honking sound, then patted my cheek hard enough to sting. "Beppe! He is my cousin!" Of course he was. Everyone was someone's cousin here. She immediately produced a bottle of mirto from somewhere in her blue ensemble and poured me a generous glass. The coffee was forgotten.

Over the next hour, perched on my tiny balcony overlooking the sea, Signora Fenu delivered what I can only describe as a comprehensive oral history of Torre dei Corsari. Her nephew Giovanni ran the beach bar, she informed me, and he made a terrible cappuccino but excellent granita. Her late husband had built half the apartments in the complex with his own hands, though she gestured at a slightly crooked balcony rail with what might have been pride or criticism. A German couple in flat twelve had once tried to barbecue octopus and nearly set fire to the pines. She told this story three times, each version more dramatic, and I laughed every time because her delivery demanded it.

She left me with strict instructions to visit Giovanni before noon, when he became "philosophical" with the local beer, and a warning that the old man in flat seven, Signor Porcu, would attempt to sell me his handmade fishing lures. "He has hundreds. He does not fish." She said this as though it were a tragedy of Greek proportions.

I found Giovanni exactly as advertised, slouched behind his bar at eleven-forty-five, arguing with a sunburned Roman about football. He greeted me with a granita that was indeed excellent, then ignored me completely to continue his debate. The Roman, it emerged, was a dentist named Marco who came every August, hated the sea, and loved the arguments. "I lose on purpose now," Giovanni confided when Marco wandered off for a swim. "He stays longer if he thinks he is winning." This seemed to me a profound business strategy.

By evening I had acquired three of Signor Porcu's lures, which he pressed upon me with the urgency of a man disposing of evidence rather than making sales. He demonstrated their action in the car park, a strange jerking dance that attracted concerned looks from passing teenagers. I have never fished in my life. I suspect he knows this.

That first day, sheep-stained and slightly drunk on mirto, I sat on my crooked balcony and listened to Signora Fenu shouting affectionate abuse at someone on the phone below. The sea did that particular Mediterranean thing where it looks almost too blue to be decent. I thought about how I had arrived expecting solitude and a bit of swimming, and instead found myself collected, scrutinised, and more or less adopted by people who had no particular reason to bother.

I am not naturally good at being looked after by strangers. I tend to apologise too much, to treat hospitality as an intrusion rather than a gift. But there is something about being stuck in sheep traffic with no escape that strips away your usual defences. You arrive flustered and ridiculous, and somehow that becomes your introduction rather than your embarrassment.

Signora Fenu knocked on my door at nine with leftover fregola she had made "too much" of, though the portion suggested industrial-scale miscalculation. She sat with me while I ate, correcting my pronunciation and telling me which coves the locals actually used, not the ones in the guidebooks. I understood perhaps sixty percent of what she said. It did not seem to matter to either of us.

I went to sleep that night with the windows open, listening to distant arguments and the particular silence of the sea when it is very close. Somewhere, I suspected, Beppe was still moving sheep around with serene indifference to anyone's schedule but his own. I had three fishing lures in my kitchen drawer and a growing suspicion that I would not use them, but would treasure them absurdly.

The holiday had not started as planned. I suspect that was precisely the point.