I should have known the holiday proper had begun when I managed to lock our hire car keys inside the boot at a petrol station just outside Karlskrona. There we stood, my partner and I, in the thin drizzle that seems to follow me to every Scandinavian country, watching our sandwiches and spare jumpers hostages behind glass. A chap called Lennart, filling up his Volvo with an actual dog in the passenger seat, spent twenty minutes helping us jimmy the latch with a wire coat hanger he'd produced from nowhere. "First time in Blekinge?" he asked, not unkindly. "You will like the people. We are patient. We have to be, with the weather."

He wasn't wrong about that. By the time we reached the turning for Naevragoel, the drizzle had graduated to something more committed, and I was navigating by a screenshot because I'd forgotten to download the offline map. The lane narrowed to a track between granite outcrops and birch trees, and I kept waiting for the sat nav to admit defeat and simply sigh at me. Then suddenly the trees opened up and there was Holmsjoe, grey and glittering, with our little red timber cottage perched above it like something from a children's illustration.

The key was in a coded box, which of course I couldn't open because I'd written the code on my phone, which had died somewhere near Ronneby. I was knocking on the neighbouring cottage's door with the desperate cheerfulness of a Jehovah's Witness before I'd properly thought it through. An elderly woman answered, drying her hands on a tea towel, and listened to my entire explanation without changing expression. "You are the English," she said finally, not as a question. "I am Ingrid. I have a charger. Also, I have cake." She said this last as though the two items were equally essential to survival, which I suppose they were.

Ingrid's cottage smelled of cinnamon and something medicinal she couldn't identify when I asked. She moved slowly but with complete purpose, fetching her charger, cutting her cake, telling me about the German couple who'd stayed in our cottage last summer and tried to barbecue in a thunderstorm. "They were very nice," she said, with the particular Swedish intonation that makes even criticism sound like fond observation. "Very optimistic people." I recognised myself in this description and felt a strange warmth.

She insisted on walking me back, though it was perhaps fifty metres, and introduced me to her husband Sven, who was standing in the lake up to his knees in waders, apparently doing nothing at all. "He is thinking," Ingrid explained. Sven raised a hand without turning. "He has been thinking since 1987. It is his hobby." I laughed, then stopped when I realised she wasn't joking, or perhaps she was, or perhaps in Blekinge the distinction hardly matters.

The cottage itself was simple and slightly crooked, with windows that didn't quite close and a wood-burning stove that Ingrid immediately took charge of, ignoring my protests that I could manage. "You are the English," she repeated, as though this explained my incompetence. "You have central heating. This is different. You must respect the fire, or it will punish you." She demonstrated the damper settings with the solemnity of a priest, while Sven appeared silently in the doorway, still in his waders, carrying fish he'd apparently caught while thinking. "For your dinner," he said, the first words I'd heard him speak. "The lake provides. You must not waste."

I promised sincerely that we wouldn't waste anything, ever, and they both nodded as though this was the correct response, the only possible response, and perhaps in that moment, in that particular place, it genuinely was. The rain had stopped without my noticing. Through the imperfectly sealed windows, Holmsjoe looked almost silver in the late afternoon, and I could smell the fish and the woodsmoke and something else, something I couldn't name, the particular scent of a holiday beginning despite everything, because of everything, with strangers who had already become something else.