I have never been so grateful for a functioning kettle in my entire life, and that includes the time I tried to make tea at a music festival using a car battery. The journey to Las Palmas de Gran Canaria had been one of those travel days where everything goes slightly wrong in a way that will, I am told, be hilarious in approximately six months.

It began with me confidently marching to the wrong gate at Gatwick, despite having checked the boarding pass three times. There is something deeply humbling about being the person sprinting through an airport with a tote bag flapping behind you like a distressed seagull. I arrived at the correct gate to find a delay, then another delay, then a mysterious "technical issue" that turned out to be someone having loaded the wrong snacks. By the time we landed in Gran Canaria, I was running on four hours of sleep and a packet of crisps that had somehow fused together into a single salty brick.

The taxi driver who collected me was called Manolo, and he took one look at my face and declared, in excellent English, "You need coffee before you see the apartment. I know a place." This was not a question. We pulled up at a tiny cafe near Las Canteras beach where the owner, a woman in her sixties with hair the colour of aubergines, took my measure in seconds. "English," she said, not unkindly. "Always tired, always polite. Sit." Her name was Pilar, and she made me a cortado so strong I could feel my eyelids physically retracting. She told me about her sister in Swindon, whom she visits annually and always finds baffling. "The weather," she said, spreading her hands as if explaining a personal insult. "Always grey. Always. Why do you live like this?"

I had no satisfactory answer.

The apartment itself, when I finally reached it, was in one of those white-painted blocks that cluster near the beach like friendly teeth. The key was in a lockbox with a code that the owner, a cheerful German called Klaus who had retired to Gran Canaria fifteen years ago, had sent me. Klaus appeared on the landing as I was fumbling with it, having heard my distinctive combination of muttering and dropping things. He was wearing sandals with socks, which I have since learned is practically formal wear in these parts.

"First time?" he asked, watching me fail to open the box for a fourth time.

"Is it that obvious?"

"You have the look," he said, taking over and popping it open with one thumb. "The look of someone who has been defeated by an airport."

The flat was simple and clean, with a balcony that looked towards the sea and, more immediately, towards the neighbouring balcony where an elderly man was watering approximately forty potted plants. This was Domingo. He waved. I waved back. He shouted something in Spanish that I did not catch, then switched to surprisingly fluent French, then gestured until I understood he was offering me a cutting from his geraniums. Klaus translated, amused.

"He says you look like you need something to look after. He says plants are better than people, they do not argue."

I accepted the geranium. It seemed rude not to.

That evening, still operating on Klaus's recommendation, I walked to a small restaurant on Calle Luis Morote where I was the only non-local. The waiter, a young man with elaborate tattoos of marine life up both arms, took my order then sat down opposite me to explain, in detail, why the fish I had chosen was excellent but the potatoes were merely adequate. His name was Iago, and he had strong opinions about Canarian potatoes that I suspect he would share with anyone who made eye contact for more than two seconds. "The small ones," he said, making a precise gesture with his fingers, "with the salt crust, from the south. Those are the ones. These?" He shrugged with genuine sadness. "These are from the supermarket."

I ate the adequate potatoes and found them perfectly delicious, though I did not tell Iago this. Some conversations are better left unfinished.

By the time I fell into bed that first night, the geranium on the windowsill and the sound of Domingo still moving about on his balcony, I felt something shift. The tiredness remained, but it had company now. I had arrived expecting a beach holiday and found instead a collection of small, vivid encounters, each one slightly absurd, each one offered without obligation. Pilar's blunt kindness. Klaus's practical sympathy. Domingo's wordless generosity. Iago's passionate potato critique.

I thought about my kettle, waiting in the kitchen. I thought about Pilar's cortado, and how she had not asked if I wanted it but simply known. There is a particular sort of arrival, I am learning, where you do not so much visit a place as gradually get adopted by it, one slightly chaotic interaction at a time. I fell asleep to the sound of the Atlantic somewhere beyond the buildings, and the faint, rhythmic squeak of Domingo's balcony door, opening and closing, as he tended his garden in the dark.