I have never been so grateful for a sat nav's patronising voice as I was driving down to Karlskrona. Three hours from Gothenburg, full of Swedish radio I could not understand and an increasingly desperate need for a wee, I finally reached the turn for Sturko. That is when I spotted the enormous elk statue outside someone's garden and, in my delirium, thought it would be hilarious to pull over for a photo. Reader, I got stuck. Not the car, mind you, me. My shoe wedged between two rocks, my dignity wedged somewhere in the neighbouring county. A man in a faded blue boiler suit appeared from nowhere, chewing something thoughtfully, and freed me without a word. He just nodded, patted the elk's leg, and wandered back toward his shed. I never even got his name.

The cottage itself, when I finally found it, sat perched on granite looking out toward the archipelago. My first morning, I shuffled down to the water in mismatched socks and encountered Bengt, who was dragging a small boat across the rocks with the casual determination of someone who had done this ten thousand times. He looked at my socks, looked at the boat, and said, "You English?" as if this explained everything. He told me he had lived on Sturko since 1967, that his wife made excellent pickled herring, and that I was holding the mooring rope wrong. He demonstrated three times. I failed three times. He sighed, took the rope, and we stood in comfortable silence watching a cormorant dry its wings on a nearby skerry.

The shop in Karlskrona harbour became my daily pilgrimage, not for groceries particularly, but for Ingrid, who ran the till with the precision of a bank manager and the gossip skills of a village pub landlady. She memorised my biscuit preference by day two and started adding Swedish lessons to my receipt. "You say it like you have potato in mouth," she informed me when I attempted "tack sa mycket." She was not wrong. By day four she had me trying to pronounce the names of local islands, laughing so hard she had to hold onto the cigarette display.

My most profound conversation came with Lena, who fished from the same spot each evening near the old fortifications. She spoke English with the careful slowness of someone who had learned it from wartime radio broadcasts, and she used this to deliver devastating observations about my character. "You are always rushing," she said, watching me fumble with my camera. "Even when you stand still, you rush inside." I wanted to argue, but I was too busy adjusting my settings and nearly dropped the lens cap in the sea. She smiled, reeled in nothing, and cast again.

There was also the German couple in the neighbouring cottage who had been coming for fifteen summers, who invited me for aquavit and explained the proper way to complain about the weather. "You must be disappointed but not surprised," the husband instructed. His wife translated his hand gestures into English, though he was speaking English. They argued about whether I should visit the naval museum. They agreed I had terrible shoes for island life.

On my final morning, Bengt appeared again as I packed the car. He handed me a jar of something orange and unidentifiable. "Wife's," he said. I thanked him. He nodded at the sat nav, still mounted on my windscreen. "That woman," he said, "she does not know Sturko." He was absolutely right. She had never once directed me to anyone worth meeting.