I have never been so relieved to see a red wooden house in my life. Twelve hours after leaving Gatwick, two flights, one hire car, and a deeply misguided attempt to navigate using what I had confidently described as "intuition rather than technology," I found myself at a dead end in a Torhamn potato field, staring at a very unimpressed man on a tractor.

"Karlskrona?" he said, removing his cap to scratch his head in what I can only describe as theatrical disbelief. "You are..." He made a vague spiralling gesture with one finger. "How you say? Going in circles."

I had, it turned out, driven past my turn three times. The sat nav sat ignored in my pocket, my phone battery at four percent, my dignity somewhere back near the airport in Ronneby. The man, who introduced himself as Sten and spoke English with the resigned patience of someone who had rescued many lost Britons before me, climbed down from his tractor and drew me a map on the back of a feed receipt. "You see Ingrid," he said, tapping the paper. "She has the key. She is expecting you. Since yesterday."

Ingrid, it transpired, had been expecting me since the previous afternoon, when I had apparently confirmed my arrival time in an email I now vaguely remembered sending during a layover in Copenhagen, fuelled by overpriced lager and misplaced optimism. She lived in a cottage attached to the holiday home, a arrangement I had somehow missed entirely in my booking excitement.

I found her in her garden, attacking a rhubarb patch with what I can only call religious fervour. She was perhaps seventy, wearing wellingtons and a cardigan that had seen better decades, and she looked up at my approach with the expression of someone who had long ago lost faith in the punctuality of the British.

"You are the late one," she said. Not a question.

"I got a bit lost," I offered.

"In Sweden," she said, "we have roads. With signs. On poles." She considered this for a moment. "Perhaps in England, you have different system?"

She led me to the house, a traditional red wooden affair with white trim that looked exactly as the photographs had promised and yet somehow more itself in person. The smell of pine hit me immediately, that particular Scandinavian combination of cleaning products and forest that makes you feel simultaneously inadequate and aspirational. Ingrid showed me the wood-burning stove with the air of someone demonstrating a religious artefact, explained the composting toilet with a frankness that made me blush, and pointed out the archipelago views with the casual pride of someone who had simply stopped noticing how extraordinary they were.

"Tomorrow," she said, pausing at the door, "you will meet Gunnar. He fishes. He will tell you everything is worse than before. The fish, the weather, the government. Everything." She smiled suddenly, revealing a gap where a tooth once lived. "But he will bring you fish anyway. He always does."

I watched her stride back to her rhubarb, attacking it with renewed vigour, and I stood there in the doorway with my single functioning suitcase and my thoroughly battered sense of competence, watching the light turn gold across the Blekinge archipelago. Somewhere, a cuckoo called. The wood stove ticked as it cooled. I had arrived, finally, in a state of complete ridiculousness, to a place where strangers drew me maps and expected nothing except my eventual appearance, where the rhubarb demanded immediate attention and the fish would arrive regardless of my worthiness.

I made tea with water that tasted of granite and lake, and I sat on the wooden deck as the evening settled around me like something patient and old. The potato field debacle already felt like a story I might tell with something approaching affection, the kind of beginning that makes the rest matter more. Somewhere out there, Gunnar was presumably complaining about something, and Ingrid was winning her war against the rhubarb, and I was exactly where I had meant to be, despite every attempt to be elsewhere.