I should have known the holiday was going to be characterful when my sat-nav decided that "Stezyca" was pronounced "Stee-zee-ka" and sent me down what I can only describe as a tractor's idea of a shortcut. There I was, bumping along a lane flanked by birch trees, my Renault Clio making sounds I have never heard before and hope never to hear again. The mishap, if you can call it that, came when I rounded a corner and found myself face to face with a very large pig. Not just any pig. This pig had the air of someone who owned the road and was considering charging rent. I reversed fifty yards with the grace of a panicked crab, only to discover I had been watched the entire time by an elderly chap leaning on a gate, smoking a pipe that smelled distinctly of cherries.

"First time meeting the mayor?" he called out, deadpan, as I finally emerged onto proper tarmac.

"The mayor?"

"Of the lane. She's been here longer than me." He introduced himself as Bogdan, though he said everyone called him Boczek, which apparently means "bacon" and which he found hilarious given the circumstances. He directed me to the Stezyca property with the kind of hand gestures that suggested he had spent decades waving at tractors, and off I went, slightly shaken but already grinning.

The house itself sat among pines near the lake, all wooden beams and the particular hush that comes from being properly surrounded by forest. I had barely stepped onto the porch when a woman emerged from next door carrying a basket of mushrooms and a look of intense appraisal. This was Danuta, who informed me within ninety seconds that she had already checked my windows for drafts, found them satisfactory, and would be leaving me a jar of pickled herring because "English people need fattening up." I started to protest that I was quite capable of fattening myself up, thank you, but she had already moved on to critiquing my parking.

"Too straight," she said, shaking her head. "Only Germans park that straight. Angle it a bit, look more relaxed."

I angled it. She nodded, apparently satisfied, and disappeared into the trees with her mushrooms, though not before extracting a promise that I would come for coffee the following morning.

The coffee invitation turned out to be less optional than implied. I arrived at nine to find Danuta, her husband Wladek, and a man introduced only as "the Professor" seated around a table laden with enough cake to constitute structural engineering. The Professor, it emerged, was not a professor of anything in particular but had read extensively and would now be sharing his thoughts. On everything. He held forth on Kashubian linguistic peculiarities, the decline of proper bread, and my own accent, which he declared "surprisingly comprehensible for an islander." Wladek said nothing for the first twenty minutes, then suddenly produced a harmonica and played something mournful and lovely, after which he returned to his cake without commentary.

By day three I had accumulated what felt like an extended family I had never asked for and could not now imagine losing. There was young Tomek from the village shop, who refused to let me buy mediocre wine when "someone from abroad" was visiting and substituted something local and alarming instead. There was the woman at the lakeside who sold me a fishing permit and spent twenty minutes explaining why the perch were "depressed this year" due to weather patterns I could not follow. There was even the postman, who on learning I was staying a fortnight, began delivering my post to the Stezyca house rather than the official address, because "it's closer to my route this way, and I'm not getting younger."

What struck me, sitting on that porch with Tomek's alarming wine and the particular golden light that seems to hang in Kashubian pines, was how thoroughly I had been collected. I had arrived with my mishap and my self-sufficiency and my carefully packed guidebook, and I had been gently but firmly absorbed into something else entirely. The pig still ruled the lane. Danuta still critiqued my life choices. The Professor still held court on Tuesdays. And I, somehow, had become part of the furniture, in the nicest possible way.

I left with more pickled herring than I knew what to do with, a harmonica tune stuck in my head, and the certain knowledge that my parking would never again satisfy anyone in Poland.