I have never been so grateful for a sat nav with a sense of humour as I was driving into Grzybowo last July. There I was, cruising along the Polish coast with the Baltic Sea glittering to my left, feeling terribly pleased with myself for booking what the website called a "traditional seaside retreat." The sat nav, however, had other ideas. It directed me down a lane barely wide enough for a bicycle, past a field of extremely judgmental goats, and finally announced "You have reached your destination" while I sat in front of what was unmistakably a fish smokehouse. The smell was magnificent. The location was wrong. I had typed the postcode in backwards.

Twenty minutes of increasingly creative reversing later, I found the actual place. The key was in a lockbox with a code that the owner, a chap named Tadeusz, had texted me along with seventeen emojis, most of them fish-related. I never did ask why.

The cottage itself was one of those white wooden numbers with a steep roof and a porch that creaked in a friendly, non-structural way. I dumped my bags and immediately went in search of coffee, which is how I met Bogdana. She was tending the neighbour's garden with the focused intensity of someone defusing a bomb. She looked up, sized up my desperate expression, and said in surprisingly good English, "You are the English. You will want coffee. Come."

Her kitchen was a museum of ceramic roosters and inexplicable tension. She poured me something thick and black from a pot that had clearly been simmering since the Solidarity era, then sat opposite me with her arms folded. "My husband," she announced without prompting, "he fishes. He talks to fish. They do not answer. This is why we are still married." She delivered this with such perfect timing that I nearly choked. Over the next hour she explained the entire social hierarchy of Grzybowo, which apparently ran: fishermen, pensioners who used to be fishermen, people from Warsaw with second homes, and finally "the Germans on bicycles, who are everywhere and mean well."

I encountered one of these Germans that evening. His name was Dieter, he was seventy if he was a day, and he was attempting to repair a puncture with what appeared to be a bread roll and determination. "Polish roads," he sighed, not looking up, "they eat the tyres. In Germany we have asphalt. Here they have philosophy." We established that I was English, at which point he became philosophical himself. "The English," he said, "you come for the sea, you stay for the herring, you leave because of the mosquitoes. It is a pattern." He had been coming to Grzybowo for fifteen years. He did not know why. "Perhaps the mosquitoes have my address."

The next morning I walked to the beach, which took twelve minutes through pine woods that smelled of resin and distant barbecues. The Baltic was doing its usual grey-green shimmer, not warm enough for sensible swimming but absolutely fine for the Poles, who plunged in with the stoicism of people who had never expected comfort. An elderly man in trunks that had seen better decades struck up conversation while we both watched a child chase a terrified crab. "Cold water," he said, "is Polish spa. Good for character. Bad for testicles." He waded in without another word.

By day three I had developed a routine. Morning coffee with Bogdana, who updated me on her husband's increasingly one-sided fish conversations. Afternoon beach walks where I nodded to the same pensioners who nodded back with the cautious approval reserved for regulars. Evening trips to the little shop where the woman behind the counter pretended not to recognise me before handing over my exact purchase, unasked: bread, cheese, and a beer she had already chilled.

Tadeusz appeared on my fourth day, ostensibly to check the boiler but really, I suspect, to assess whether I was the sort of English person who caused international incidents. He was sixty, built like a wardrobe, and possessed the most expressive eyebrows I have ever encountered. They rose when I mentioned Bogdana. They rose further when I mentioned Dieter. They achieved something near verticality when I admitted the sat nav incident. "The goats," he said slowly, "they are famous. People come for goats now. You are tourist attraction." I could not tell if this was worse or better than being an ordinary tourist.

We ended up at the local bar that evening, a place called something unpronounceable that everyone called "the blue one" because of its door. Tadeusz bought vodka. I bought beer. A fisherman named Krzysztof joined us and spent forty minutes explaining why the herring this year were "political," a statement he refused to elaborate on. Another man, who never gave his name, sang two verses of a shanty, cried briefly, and left. The barman, who had watched this with the patience of a man who had watched everything before, polished a glass and said to me, "You come back next year?" It was not quite a question.

I have thought about that evening more than I expected. There is something about places like Grzybowo, about their particular rhythm of small kindnesses and smaller absurdities, that gets under your skin. I went for the Baltic, for the promise of a cheap coastal break. I stayed, in the end, for Bogdana's coffee and Dieter's puncture repairs and Krzysztof's political herring. The mosquitoes were indeed terrible. I have already booked for August.