I should have known the holiday was going to be characterful when I got spectacularly lost somewhere between Poznan and what I kept calling "the Boruja place," much to the confusion of every local I phoned. My sat-nav had apparently decided that a dirt track through a beet field constituted a main road, and I found myself doing a seventeen-point turn while a man on a tractor watched with the patient amusement of someone who has seen this exact scene approximately four thousand times before.

When I finally crunched up the proper gravel drive to the Boruja, a handsome brick manor house sitting in proper Wielkopolska countryside, I was greeted not by the owner but by a white goose the size of a border terrier who clearly considered himself the actual proprietor. He hissed. I yelped. A woman appeared from behind a shed, wiping her hands on an apron, and said something in Polish that I later learned roughly translated to "Don't worry, he only bites people he respects."

This was Danuta, the neighbour who "helps out," though over the next three days I realised she essentially ran the place with the benign authority of a village matriarch. She showed me round the Boruja with the pride of someone displaying their own home, pointing out the original ceiling beams, the wood-burning stove I'd definitely struggle to light, and the garden that apparently produced vegetables of such excellence that previous guests had wept. "English woman, last month, cried over my tomatoes," Danuta said, nodding solemnly. "Good tomatoes."

The actual owner, Tomek, appeared that evening bearing a bottle of homemade nalewka that could have stripped paint. He was a lanky chap in his fifties with the weathered look of someone who spent his twenties doing something inexplicable, which turned out to be exactly right. "I was punk rocker in Lodz," he announced, as if this explained the Boruja's eclectic collection of vintage film posters and the guitar-shaped dent in the kitchen wall. He now worked in IT in Poznan but spent weekends here, "growing things and remembering I have hands." He demonstrated by showing me his vegetable patch by torchlight, identifying plants with the tender specificity usually reserved for introducing family members.

The morning brought my favourite encounter. I'd wandered to the village shop, a cupboard-sized establishment run by a woman named Halina who appeared to be approximately ninety and who served me coffee from a thermos before I'd asked for anything. She spoke no English and my Polish extends to "please," "thank you," and "beer," yet we conducted a twenty-minute conversation of extraordinary depth. I know this because she used extensive hand gestures to explain her daughter's divorce, her grandson's football prospects, and her strong opinions about the EU's agricultural policies. I nodded, made sympathetic noises, and understood perhaps twelve percent of the actual words. When I left with bread, cheese, and an unexpected bag of pickled mushrooms, I felt genuinely moved by this complete stranger's willingness to fold me into her morning.

That afternoon, Tomek's teenage son turned up on a moped that sounded like an angry wasp in a tin can. He was called Kuba, wore a tracksuit of aggressive neon, and spent forty-five minutes explaining his plan to become a professional streamer while helping his father fix a fence. His father responded with the weary patience of someone who had heard this plan approximately seven hundred times. "In my day we had dreams too," Tomek told me later. "We just didn't tell everyone immediately. You had to find out by accident at the pub."

By my second evening, sitting by the Boruja's fire with Danuta's goulash and Tomek's paint-stripper nalewka, I found myself reflecting on how rarely I properly meet people on holiday. Usually it's transactional, polite, forgettable. Here, in this slightly ramshackle manor surrounded by beet fields and opinionated geese, I'd stumbled into something that felt almost old-fashioned: genuine, slightly chaotic human connection without any performance or pretence. I was a stranger who got lost, who couldn't light a stove, who made a goose yelp, and somehow that was enough to be welcomed into a small, stubbornly individual world.

On my final morning, Halina appeared at the Boruja with more pickled mushrooms and a handwritten note in Polish that Danuta translated as "Come back when the plums are ready." I have no idea when plum season actually is, but I've already started checking flights.