The SatNav had other ideas about how to get to Meijel, which is how I ended up in a farmyard near Weert, surrounded by very judgemental goats, with my partner declaring that this was "definitely not a holiday cottage." Three-point turn, mild swearing, and twenty minutes later we pulled up to the actual property: a converted farmhouse with a thatched roof that looked like it had been sketched by someone who really believed in the Netherlands.

Our host, Piet, emerged from a shed carrying what I initially thought was a small dog but turned out to be an extremely hairy cat. He shook my hand with the grip of a man who spent forty years pulling things from soil, then spent ten minutes explaining the boiler while periodically shouting "HELMUT" at the cat, which never once responded. "He is deaf," Piet said, without further elaboration, as if this explained everything about Helmut and perhaps about life itself.

The neighbour appeared over the fence before we'd even unloaded the car. Ria, eighty-something, wearing gardening clogs and a coat that had seen several monarchs. She wanted to know where we were from, why we'd come to Meijel specifically, whether we liked asparagus, and - crucially - whether my partner was "the tall sort of English or the disappointing sort." I am, apparently, the disappointing sort. She gave us a jar of something brown and unlabelled, which Piet later identified as her "famous apple butter, famous mostly for being older than some trees."

That evening we walked to the village pub, which Piet had described as "not fancy" with the pride of a man describing a well-loved tractor. Inside we found Gerrit behind the bar, who had opinions about British beer that he delivered unprompted while pulling our pints. "You drink it warm," he announced, though I suspect he knew this was outdated. His wife Jose appeared from the kitchen to argue about whether I'd said "bitter" or "lager," a distinction she treated with the gravity of international diplomacy. They'd run the place for thirty-two years. Gerrit had grown up in the house next door, back when it was still a farm, back when Meijel had "proper shops, not just the Albert Heijn." Jose rolled her eyes with the practised weariness of someone who had heard this timeline approximately four thousand times.

A man at the bar introduced himself only as "the other Gerrit," to distinguish himself from the landlord. He farmed sugar beet nearby and wanted to know if we understood the European sugar quota system. I did not. He explained it anyway, with diagrams on beer mats, while his wife Toos told my partner about her sister in Manchester who "married a man with no chin, but what can you do."

By the second evening, Ria had established a surveillance system. She appeared whenever we opened the front door, offering advice on the weather, the bin collection, and whether we were "using the big oven or just the small one like lazy people." She told us about her husband, dead twelve years, who had also been "the disappointing sort of tall." She said this with such warmth that I felt genuinely moved, though possibly she was still talking about height.

Piet reappeared on our final morning to collect the keys and deliver a lecture about Helmut's dietary requirements that lasted eleven minutes. The cat himself watched from the windowsill with the blank indifference of a creature who had never once heard his own name. "He is happy," Piet insisted, though nothing about Helmut suggested any emotion whatsoever.

We left with apple butter, unresolved questions about sugar quotas, and the certain knowledge that we had been thoroughly inspected and found moderately acceptable. Meijel had not been on any must-visit list. The goats had been wrong, the SatNav malicious, and the welcome absolutely disproportionate to our merits as guests. I keep the apple butter unopened. Some things improve with age, apparently, and I am not yet ready to discover whether Ria's famous preserves outlast the memory of being called the disappointing sort.