I have never been so grateful for a sat nav with a sense of humour as I was driving towards Nowe Warpno last summer. There I was, cruising through the Pomeranian countryside, convinced I was minutes from my holiday cottage, when the thing announced in that calm, betraying voice that I had arrived. I had not arrived. I had parked outside what appeared to be a shed devoted to the storage of enormous cabbages. A man emerged from behind it, wiping his hands on a cloth that had seen better decades, and peered at me through my windscreen with the kind of patience that suggested this happened weekly.

"You are lost," he said. Not a question. A statement of fact, delivered with the gentle authority of someone who had watched many foreigners discover that Polish country roads do not bend to the will of Google.

I wound down my window and admitted everything. He nodded, scratched his chin, and then embarked upon directions so elaborate and gesture-heavy that I understood perhaps every third word. Something about a church, definitely a left turn at a particular tree, and what I later realised was the Polish word for "swamp." I thanked him profusely. He waved me off with a small smile that suggested he would see me again in twenty minutes.

Reader, I did not see him again in twenty minutes. I saw him again in forty, having performed a complete circuit of what I can only describe as an accidental agricultural tour. This time he was waiting outside a small shop, drinking something from a plastic cup, and he simply opened my passenger door and got in. "I will take you," he said. "My name is Tadeusz. You are English. You need help."

We drove in companionable silence for several minutes before he asked, entirely without preamble, whether I believed in ghosts. I said I had not given it much thought. He nodded sagely and informed me that the cottage I had rented, the one with the wooden decking and the view of the lake, was built on ground where nothing had previously stood because the local fishermen had considered it unlucky. "Too windy," he added, as if this explained everything. "The fish do not like the wind. The ghosts do not like the wind. Everyone unhappy."

I asked if he was a fisherman. He laughed, a proper belly laugh, and said he had been, until he discovered he was allergic to fish. "Very sad. Very funny also. My wife thinks this is God's joke on me." He pointed out his wife a moment later, a formidable woman in a floral apron who was standing in a garden clipping something with tremendous violence. She looked up, saw me, and immediately began walking towards the car with the determination of someone who had opinions to share.

Her name was Halina. She spoke no English whatsoever but communicated through Tadeusz with the efficiency of a long-established diplomatic channel. She wanted to know if I liked mushrooms. I said I did. She produced a paper bag from her apron pocket and pressed it upon me with ceremonial gravity. "She picked them this morning," Tadeusz translated. "She says you look like someone who would appreciate proper mushrooms, not supermarket mushrooms. She says supermarket mushrooms are an insult."

I accepted the bag with what I hoped was appropriate reverence. Halina studied my face, nodded once, and returned to her clipping.

The cottage, when we finally reached it, was exactly as advertised: wooden, compact, with that particular smell of pine and lake water that makes you immediately want to open every window. Tadeusz helped me with my bags, refused payment with genuine offence, and stood in the doorway delivering what I can only assume was a comprehensive briefing on local hazards. Something about wasps. Something definitely about the septic tank. He finished by pointing at the lake and saying, "Beautiful. Cold. Do not swim after beer." Then he left, and I stood alone in the silence of Pomerania, holding a bag of possibly illegal mushrooms, wondering how I had acquired a Polish uncle in under an hour.

That evening I sat on the decking with a cup of tea that had gone cold because I kept getting distracted by the light on the water. A woman appeared at the fence, walking a dog of indeterminate breed that appeared to be assembled from spare parts. She introduced herself as Magda, said she was the cleaner, and asked if I had met Tadeusz and Halina yet. I said I had. She rolled her eyes with the affectionate exasperation of someone who had known them decades. "Tadeusz tells everyone about the ghosts. There are no ghosts. He just likes to feel important." The dog made a noise like a small engine failing. "This is Burek. He is stupid but he is honest. This is rare in a dog."

We talked for twenty minutes, mostly about her son in Szczecin who worked in IT and never visited, and about the best time to buy smoked fish from the man who appeared at the end of the lane on Thursday mornings. "He is unreliable," she said. "But his fish is excellent. Life is compromise."

She left, and the light changed, and I sat there with my cold tea and my mushrooms and my new understanding that this place was not going to be about the things I did but about the people I would keep meeting in unexpected ways. I had come for the lake and the quiet. I was staying for the conversations that happened in doorways and over fences, the small human negotiations that make a place feel inhabited rather than merely visited.

The next morning I saw Tadeusz again, cycling past with a wave, and Halina, who pointed at my mushroom bag and gave me a thumbs up. I had not cooked them yet. I was saving them, I realised, for when I felt ready to belong here even slightly. That might take days. That might take the whole fortnight. Either way, I had time. The lake was not going anywhere. Neither, apparently, were my new acquaintances, who seemed to have adopted me with the casual efficiency of people who had done this many times before and knew exactly how much involvement was required.

I was beginning to suspect it was rather a lot.