The train from Stockholm had been blessedly uneventful right up until Orebro Central, where I promptly walked out of the wrong exit and spent twenty minutes dragging my wheeled case through what I later learned was the staff car park, searching for a taxi rank that was literally fifty yards behind me. A bloke in a hi-vis jacket eventually took pity, pointed me back the way I'd come, and said something in Swedish that I choose to believe was sympathetic rather than mocking. I nodded gratefully, pretended I understood, and performed what I can only describe as a dignity-lacking reverse march with a stuck wheel.

The taxi driver, a chap called Lars with a beard you could lose a sandwich in, immediately clocked my confusion and asked if this was my first time in Kopparberg. I admitted it was, and that I'd already managed to get lost without technically leaving the station. He laughed so hard he had to pull over, which I suppose counts as a bonding experience. He told me he'd lived in the area since the seventies, back when the mining heritage still dominated everything, and that the holiday cottage I'd booked was "proper old Sweden, not that city nonsense." I wasn't entirely sure what this meant, but I liked the sound of it.

The cottage sat on the edge of a small settlement, surrounded by birch trees and the kind of silence that makes you realise how much noise your own brain usually produces. Lars helped me with my bags, refused a tip with genuine offence, and pointed at a red house across the lane. "That's Ingrid," he said, as if this explained everything. It did not.

I discovered what he meant the following morning when I attempted to work out the composting toilet. Ingrid, who must be seventy-five if she's a day, appeared at my fence like a particularly practical guardian angel, carrying a jar of cloudberry jam and absolutely no patience for my incompetence. She spoke rapid Swedish until she clocked my panic, switched to English with visible reluctance, and proceeded to give me a ten-minute tutorial on rural sanitation that I will never forget. She had opinions about my hiking boots ("too new"), my plans to visit the local lake ("too cold"), and my general approach to life ("too English"). I accepted the jam and the criticism in equal measure. We've since developed what I can only describe as a friendship based on mutual exasperation.

The bloke who runs the nearest shop, a tiny cooperative that sells everything from fishing line to surprisingly good coffee, is called Gunnar. He has exactly three conversational settings: local history, football, and the superiority of Swedish dairy products. I made the mistake of mentioning I usually drink tea. He looked at me the way you might look at someone who'd admitted to eating their own shoes. "We have milk," he said, with the gravity of a man offering a life-saving transplant. We now have an ongoing arrangement where I buy his recommended cheese and he asks increasingly pointed questions about the British economy. I think he worries about me.

There's a woman called Kristina who maintains the walking trails, and I met her while attempting a route that Ingrid had already warned me against. She was clearing a fallen branch, stopped to watch me struggle up a muddy incline, and offered no assistance whatsoever until I'd completed the indignity. Then she produced a flask of coffee and told me she'd been doing this job for thirty-two years, that the particular moss I'd just fallen into was "historically significant," and that I should come to her husband's accordion practice on Thursday. I said I didn't play. She said this was obvious, but that I could listen. I'm going.

What strikes me about this place is how quickly the locals have moved from polite tolerance to something more involved, something that includes unsolicited advice, jars of preserves, and invitations to musical events I am fundamentally unqualified to attend. There's no performative friendliness here, no tourism-trained cheerfulness. Ingrid once told me, completely unprompted, that my hair looked better messy. Gunnar regularly implies I am personally responsible for Brexit. Kristina treats my physical incompetence as an entertaining long-term project.

I came here expecting quiet and solitude, and I've found something more complicated and considerably more human. The landscape is beautiful, the cottage is charming, the lake was indeed too cold. But it's the people who have made this trip what it is, who have turned my small mishaps into running jokes and my temporary presence into something they seem willing to accommodate, if not entirely approve of.

I still haven't mastered that composting toilet, mind. Ingrid's coming round tomorrow.