I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I tried to open someone else's car at Schiphol. In my defence, it was the exact same shade of battleship grey as our hire car, and the key fob made that satisfying clunk noise. The actual owner, a very patient Dutchman in clogs, tapped on the window with his ice cream cone and said, "I think perhaps you are lost, yes?" I was lost. In every possible sense.

The drive up to Bergen aan Zee took about forty minutes, which I spent in mortified silence while my partner Tom kept muttering, "Clogs. He was actually wearing clogs. In real life." The flat Dutch landscape gradually gave way to dunes, and suddenly there we were, pulling up to our little holiday house tucked between the sand hills and the village proper.

Our neighbour was already waiting. Not for us specifically, but Jan appeared to be waiting for something, leaning on his garden gate with the patience of a man who had nowhere particular to be. He was seventy-ish, wearing a jumper that had seen better decades, and smoking a pipe that smelled of cherries and something else I couldn't identify.

"You are the English," he announced. Not a question. "I am Jan. I know everything here. Also, I know nothing. This is the Dutch way." He gestured vaguely at the dunes, the sky, possibly existence itself.

Before I could respond, a small dog shot from between his legs and began a thorough investigation of my left shoe. "This is Koning," Jan said. "It means King. He is very stupid but we do not tell him."

The house itself was charming in that slightly exhausted way of seaside places everywhere - comfortable, slightly sandy, with windows that had learned to tolerate salt air. But it was Jan who made the first impression stick. He followed us inside without invitation, apparently considering this perfectly normal, and began pointing out features with the authority of an estate agent who had long since stopped caring about commissions.

"The hot water, it takes time. You must ask it nicely. The television, it has many channels, all bad. The Germans come in summer and they are loud, but they go home eventually." He paused to relight his pipe, which had gone out. "You will go to the beach. Everyone goes to the beach. Then you will come back and say, 'Jan, the beach was windy.' And I will say, 'Yes. It is always windy. This is not news.'"

He wasn't wrong about the wind. We ventured down to the shore that evening, sand blasting horizontally across the flats, and passed a woman walking three dogs while reading a paperback, pages flapping violently. She nodded at us as if this were entirely unremarkable, her scarf streaming behind her like a flag of surrender.

Back at the house, Jan had been joined by another neighbour, a woman called Mieke who introduced herself by saying, "I am not Jan's wife. This is important. I have standards." She was peeling apples with a knife that looked older than both of them combined, dropping the skins into a bucket with surgical precision.

They bickered companionably about whether we should visit the village bakery or the slightly further bakery, which Mieke insisted had "bread with actual taste, not that white nonsense Jan prefers." Jan countered that Mieke's taste in bread was pretentious, like everything else about her. She threw an apple peel at him. He caught it in his pipe hand without looking.

I found myself envying them slightly, this easy rhythm of decades, the comfort of being thoroughly known and still tolerated. Tom and I had been together three years and still performed politeness like a dress rehearsal, asking before taking the last biscuit, apologising for needing the bathroom. These two had clearly abandoned such theatre long ago.

That night, wind rattling the windows, I lay awake listening to what I thought was the sea but turned out to be Jan's snoring, carrying clearly through the thin walls between our gardens. Tom muttered something about earplugs. I found I didn't mind. It felt like being somewhere real, somewhere lived-in, somewhere the locals had long since stopped performing for visitors and were simply getting on with being themselves.

We had two weeks ahead of us, and already I suspected the holiday would be less about the beach and more about whoever we happened to meet while buying terrible bread from Jan's preferred bakery, or getting lost again in car parks, or being educated by Mieke about proper apple varieties. The Dutch way, apparently, was knowing everything and nothing, and I was starting to think I might enjoy learning it.