I should have known the Sat Nav was up to no good when it tried to send me through a farmyard just outside Goes. There I was, crawling behind a tractor that looked older than my grandad, convinced I was being clever by avoiding the main road. The farmer leaned out, gave me a look that said "another one," and pointed back the way I'd come with a grin that suggested he'd watched this happen a hundred times before. I wound up the window and reversed like my life depended on it.

The actual approach to Wemeldinge was far more civilised, though no less eventful. I'd booked one of those traditional Zeeland cottages through Novasol, the sort with the handsome stepped gable that makes you feel like you've wandered into a painting. What I hadn't accounted for was the village itself being quite so compact, or my parking skills being quite so rubbish. I spent a good ten minutes trying to angle a medium-sized hatchback into a space designed, apparently, for a bicycle with ambitions. A woman walking her dog stopped to observe. Then a man on a bike stopped. Then they started chatting to each other about my technique, or lack thereof, in Dutch that sounded amused rather than annoyed. I waved cheerfully through the windscreen, committed to the bit, and eventually abandoned the car at something approximating seventy degrees to the kerb.

The key collection involved a chap called Henk who ran the local shop and seemed to serve as the village's unofficial mayor, postmaster, and gossip conduit all in one. He produced my keys from beneath a stack of stroopwafel boxes and immediately launched into what I can only describe as a comprehensive oral history of Wemeldinge, unprompted. I learned about the 1953 floods, his cousin's unsuccessful fishing boat venture, and precisely which bakery to visit for the best bolus before I'd even confirmed my surname. When I mentioned the parking, he laughed so hard he had to steady himself on a display of tinned herring.

"English?" he said, wiping his eyes. "We had an English couple last year. Tried to drive their caravan to the harbour. The harbour road." He shook his head at the memory, still chuckling. "Very narrow. Very wet at the end."

My cottage neighbour emerged as I was hauling my case through the narrow doorway, which I'd already managed to wedge with a poorly timed elbow. She introduced herself as Tineke, retired teacher, current keeper of approximately fifteen cats, and possessor of opinions she was happy to share. Within four minutes I knew her views on the village council's flowerbed policy, the declining quality of mussels in Yerseke, and that my gable was "the good one" because the previous owners had "not been idiots about the pointing." She inspected my parking effort through her garden hedge, declared it "creative," and insisted I come for coffee once I'd unpacked.

The unpacking, naturally, involved discovering that the cottage stairs had been designed by someone with a grudge against both suitcases and human knees. I made it to the bedroom with a degree of noise and profanity that probably confirmed Tineke's suspicions about the English. But standing at the small window, looking out over those neat brick houses towards the Oosterschelde gleaming in the late afternoon, I felt that particular shift that happens when a holiday properly begins. The mishaps weren't mishaps anymore. They were the story already forming, the characters already met, the gentle absurdity of being somewhere properly foreign rather than conveniently familiar.

Henk had said to come back if I needed anything. Tineke had said Tuesday for coffee, don't be late, she had bridge at half past. The farmer, presumably, was still laughing somewhere near Goes. I was absolutely not going to attempt the harbour road in anything larger than a sturdy pair of shoes.