I have to tell you about the time I tried to be clever with my Sat Nav and ended up in a bloke's driveway just outside Karlskrona. I'd typed in what I thought was the postcode for my holiday let, but apparently I'd confused a Swedish "O" with a zero, or something equally daft. There I was, bumper practically touching this chap's shed, while he stood in his doorway in slippers and a very serious woolly hat, watching me reverse with what I can only describe as the patience of a man who has seen this exact thing many times before.

When I finally found the right place, a lovely wooden house tucked among pine trees with that distinctive red paint you see everywhere in Blekinge, I was already half an hour late and thoroughly flustered. The owner, a woman called Ingrid who must have been pushing seventy, was waiting on the porch with two cups of coffee going cold. She didn't mention my tardiness once. Instead she launched straight into telling me about her neighbour's cat, which had apparently developed a taste for herring and was now "completely unemployable" as a mouser. I laughed more than the joke deserved, mostly from relief.

Ingrid showed me round the place with the methodical pride of someone who'd built most of it herself, which it turned out she had. Her husband, she explained, had been "useful for holding things" but little else. He'd passed five years ago, and she said this not with sadness exactly, but with the practical fondness of someone describing a reliable but limited tool. The house smelled of pine and something else I couldn't place until she opened a cupboard to reveal dozens of jars of preserved lingonberries. "You can't trust shop ones," she said, as if this were common knowledge I'd somehow missed.

That evening I walked down to the water, because in Blekinge you're never far from it, and found a small jetty where two men were fishing with the lazy concentration of people who weren't particularly bothered about catching anything. The older one, who introduced himself as Gunnar despite me not asking, immediately told me I'd walked past the best cloudberry patch in the county without noticing. "Typical English," he said, not unkindly. His companion, who never gave his name, just nodded and reeled in a line with nothing on it.

We stood there in that particular silence that comes when strangers share a view, and Gunnar told me about his brother who'd moved to Malmo and "got ideas." He said this the way other people might say "got tuberculosis." The nameless man occasionally made small sounds of agreement or disagreement, and I never worked out which was which.

On my way back, I stopped at what I thought was a shop but was actually someone's front room with a till and some biscuits. The woman running it, whose name was apparently just "the one who sells things" according to a note on the door, tried to convince me that the proper way to eat surstromming was outdoors, downwind, and preferably alone. "It's not antisocial," she insisted. "It's survival." I bought some ordinary biscuits and felt like a coward.

By the time I got back to Ingrid's house, she'd left a note saying she'd be round at eight with proper bread, and that I shouldn't worry about the shower making that noise, it was "conversational." I sat on the porch with my shop biscuits and listened to the trees, feeling already that this was going to be one of those holidays where the people stayed with me longer than the place, though the place was lovely too.

The shower, incidentally, sounded exactly like someone asking a question in a language I didn't speak.