I should have known the holiday proper had begun when I got my first taste of Swedish soil face-first outside Skoenberga. There I was, trying to look sophisticated stepping off the coach at Soderkoping with my rucksack and my carefully curated "I'm a relaxed traveller" outfit, when my left boot found the one patch of black ice the March sun hadn't bothered with. Down I went, arse over elbow, scattering mints and dignity across the platform. A chap in a flat cap who'd been leaning against the station wall didn't even flinch. Just took a slow drag on his cigarette and said, "Welcome to Ostergotland. The ground here is honest."

That was Bengt. I'd meet him properly later, but first I had to actually reach the cottage, which involved a walk through Soderkoping that revealed the town's true character in stages. The first stage was Ingrid at the ICA supermarket, who took one look at my muddy knee and insisted on selling me a packet of plasters "for the pride, mostly." She'd lived in the same flat above the shop for forty-three years, she told me, and had seen every sort of tourist disaster. "The Germans plan too much," she said, weighing my tomatoes with the air of a judge passing sentence. "The English don't plan enough. You are English, yes? I can tell by how you apologise to inanimate objects."

I was still laughing at that when I found the lane to Skoenberga, a proper country track where puddles had ambitions of becoming ponds. The cottage sat at the end like something from a children's programme, red paint and white trim and a veranda that sagged just enough to suggest personality rather than neglect. Before I could knock, the door opened and there was Ulla, the owner, holding a mug that said "World's Okayest Grandma" in Swedish.

"You fell," she announced, not as a question.

"Word travels fast."

"Ingrid texted. Also Bengt. He said you went down 'like a wardrobe.'"

I was shown round with brisk efficiency: the wood-burning stove that "rewards patience," the kitchen where the coffee maker was "older than my marriage and more reliable," the bedroom with its view of nothing but birch trees and a neighbour's barn. Ulla paused at the window. "That's Sten's place. He'll come over tomorrow with eggs, pretend he doesn't want to talk, then stay for two hours. Let him. He's lonely since the wife, and he tells the same stories but the lies get better each time."

She wasn't wrong. Next morning, there was Sten at the door with a carton of eggs and a face like thunder. "Ulla said you might need these," he grunted, though she'd said no such thing. Within twenty minutes he was settled at the kitchen table with coffee I'd made too weak, telling me about his time as a merchant seaman. "Saw a whale once," he said. "Or a very determined dolphin. The point is, I was there." Every third sentence he'd catch himself, frown, and mutter, "You're not writing this down, are you?" As if anyone would dare.

The afternoon brought Bengt from the station, who turned out to live in the next cottage along and had appointed himself unofficial mayor of the lane. He arrived with a bottle of home-pressed apple juice and a dog called Knut who immediately claimed the best chair. "I saw your fall," Bengt said, settling in with the satisfaction of a man who'd been waiting to discuss it. "The technique was poor but the commitment was excellent." He'd retired from something he never quite specified, spent his days "keeping an eye on things," and seemed to know the movements of every creature in a three-mile radius. "The badger's back," he'd announce, or "Sten's daughter called, he's in a mood now." It was less gossip than local geography, the human landscape mapped with the same attention he'd once presumably given to whatever proper job he'd held.

By evening I'd acquired a borrowed pair of ice grips from Ingrid's husband, a dinner invitation from Ulla for the following week, and a thorough briefing from Bengt on which of Sten's stories were "probably true, more or less" versus "complete fiction, but don't tell him I said." The wood stove had finally caught properly, filling the cottage with that particular dry heat that makes you drowsy and philosophical. I sat there with Knut snoring on my feet, thinking about how I'd arrived that morning embarrassed and slightly bruised, and how quickly that had been folded into something else entirely. These people had seen me at my most ridiculous and responded not with pity but with recognition, as if every visitor to Skoenberga eventually fell down somehow, literally or otherwise, and the only proper response was to dust them off and fold them into the conversation.

The fire popped and settled. Outside, something moved in the birch trees, probably that badger, going about its business with the quiet confidence of a creature that belonged completely to its place. I was a long way from belonging, but for the first time in a holiday I could remember, that didn't feel like a failure. It felt like the beginning of something, or at least like a decent story to tell when Sten came back with more eggs and worse lies, and I got to be the one who'd been there to hear them.