Getting to Karmoy involved a ferry from the mainland that I nearly missed because I was convinced the departure board said "Karmoy" when it actually said something entirely different in Norwegian. I spent twenty minutes queuing for the wrong boat, cheerfully explaining to a bemused fisherman that I was off to my holiday let, only for him to gently inform me I was about to sail in the precise opposite direction. He had the sort of weathered patience you only get from decades of tourists making exactly this sort of fool of themselves.

The cottage itself sat perched above a rocky shoreline, all red wooden cladding and slightly optimistic DIY extensions. My first encounter came within minutes of arrival, when a chap called Geir appeared from next door to introduce himself. He wore a wool jumper that looked older than I was and carried a mug of something steaming that turned out to be coffee strong enough to dissolve a spoon. "You are the English," he announced, not as a question. "I knew an English once. He tried to fish with cheese." He said this with tremendous gravity, as though revealing a terrible family secret, then spent forty minutes explaining precisely why cheese was unsuitable for North Sea cod while simultaneously helping me figure out which key opened which door. The property had accumulated keys the way some people accumulate regrets.

By evening I'd met his wife, Astrid, who arrived bearing a Tupperware of dried fish and a sceptical expression. She took one look at my inadequate footwear and emitted a small Norwegian noise of disapproval, the sort of sound that conveyed entire paragraphs about preparedness and sensible life choices. "You will walk to the shop?" she asked. I nodded. She looked at my canvas trainers, looked at the November sky, then looked at me with what I can only describe as compassionate pessimism. The shop, it transpired, was three kilometres along a coastal path that Astrid navigated daily in proper boots with actual grip. I made it halfway before the rain started horizontal and I admitted defeat, trudging back to find Geir waiting with a spare pair of wellies and absolutely no comment whatsoever. His silence was somehow louder than any teasing could have been.

The woman who ran the village shop, a tiny establishment that sold everything from fishing line to cinnamon buns, took my sodden appearance as personal entertainment. "First day?" she asked, though it was obvious. Her name was Inger and she had operated this shop for thirty-two years, which meant she knew everyone's business and considered it her duty to distribute this knowledge fairly. She told me about the German couple who'd stayed in my cottage the previous summer and argued so loudly the neighbours thought someone was being murdered. She told me about the Danish man who'd tried to pay with a credit card she'd never heard of. She told me about Geir's cousin's wedding, the one where someone fell in the fjord. By the time I left with my overpriced milk and slightly squashed bread, I knew more about local dynamics than I did about my own extended family.

That first evening, drying off by the wood burner I'd initially failed to light properly, I found myself laughing at my own ridiculousness. I'd arrived convinced I was a reasonably competent adult, yet here I was, dependent on borrowed wellies and dried fish handouts, my navigation skills exposed as fundamentally ornamental. There's something peculiarly humbling about being the incompetent foreigner in a small place where competence is simply assumed. Geir and Astrid weren't performing hospitality; they were just being neighbourly in a way that made my London-conditioned reserve feel slightly absurd. Inger wasn't being nosy; she was being interested, which is an entirely different thing I'd somehow forgotten existed.

I fell asleep that night to the sound of waves and the faint memory of Geir's parting comment, delivered with perfect deadpan: "Tomorrow, if you like, I show you proper fishing. No cheese." I hadn't the faintest intention of fishing, yet I already knew I'd say yes, because some part of me had recognised that this was exactly why I'd come: to be slightly useless in a place where people responded by being useful right back, without fuss or ceremony or any need to make a performance of it. The cheese thing, though. I never did get the full story. Some mysteries, I suspect, are best left to the locals.