I have never been particularly gifted at reading maps, which is how I found myself standing in a Bergen aan Zee car park at half past nine on a Saturday morning, arguing with a sat nav that had apparently decided I needed to see the local sheep farm before checking into my holiday cottage. The property in question was one of those charming wooden numbers tucked among the dunes, the sort that promises pine-scented evenings and the distant thunder of the North Sea. I had been dreaming of both for weeks.

My first proper conversation came courtesy of a man called Henk, who materialised from behind a hedge with a pair of secateurs and the expression of someone who had been watching my three-point turn for rather longer than was comfortable. He was seventyish, wearing gardening trousers held up by what I can only describe as optimism and a belt that had seen better decades. "You are lost," he announced, not as a question but as a cheerful fact. I admitted this was true. He nodded slowly, as though I had confirmed something he had suspected about the English for many years.

Henk walked me to the cottage himself, which took fifteen minutes because he stopped to introduce me to every single plant in his front garden. "This one," he said, gripping my elbow with surprising firmness, "this one I do not like. But my wife, she is dead now, and she loved it. So now I love it also." He said this with the practical finality of a man who had made his peace with sentimentality long ago. I found myself rather moved, though I suspect he would have been appalled by the suggestion.

The cottage key was under a ceramic frog by the door, a detail I mention only because the neighbouring cottage was owned by a woman called Mieke who emerged almost immediately to verify that I was not a burglar with particularly poor taste in target selection. She was in her fifties, possessed of the sort of directness that comes from decades of Dutch straightforwardness, and she was wearing an apron that read "I Kiss Better Than I Cook" in English, which she had clearly never properly examined. "You are the English," she said. "I am the warning system. Henk is the welcome. Together we are the full experience." She laughed like a cement mixer full of gravel and went back inside before I could respond.

I spent the afternoon failing to light the wood burner in the manner demonstrated by Henk, who had reappeared with a bundle of kindling and a patient expression that suggested he had performed this service for many previous guests. "You make fire like you drive," he observed, watching me fumble with matches. "Much energy, little result." By the time he left, the burner was roaring and I had agreed to collect his newspaper from the village shop the following morning, a task I had not remotely offered to undertake but which he had simply assumed I would accept. He was correct, as it happened.

The village shop itself proved to be a hub of what I can only call performative nosiness. The woman behind the counter, whose name I never learned because everyone simply called her "the boss," examined my purchase of milk and a postcard with the intensity of a customs official at a border crossing. "You are Henk's English," she said. "He has told everyone. You will need more milk. The cottage milk is always wrong." She said this while handing me a second bottle I had not requested. I took it. One does not argue with the boss.

That evening I walked to the sea, which was precisely as advertised: grey, restless, and indifferent to my arrival. A man with a metal detector passed me, moving with the slow deliberation of someone engaged in a lifelong argument with the shoreline. We exchanged nods, the universal language of people who have no reason to speak but feel they ought to acknowledge each other's existence. I thought about Henk and his unloved plant, about Mieke's apron and her self-appointed role as neighbourhood sentinel, about the boss and her milk prophecies. I had been in Bergen aan Zee for less than a day and already felt less like a visitor than a minor character in a story that had been running for years without me.

The wind picked up as I turned back toward the cottage, carrying the smell of salt and pine and something else I could not identify, probably someone's dinner. My fire would be out by now, I knew. Henk would not be surprised. He would simply appear tomorrow with more kindling and that expression of patient, amused resignation, and I would let him, because some welcomes are better accepted than understood.