I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I tried to unlock the wrong cabin. There we were, my partner and I, after six hours of driving from Gothenburg through forests so thick with pine they looked like green wallpaper, standing on the porch of a perfectly nice Swedish couple who were having their tea. I waved my phone at their door like it was a magic wand, utterly convinced this was our Naessjoe. The husband, a chap called Lars with eyebrows like two caterpillars having a disagreement, simply pointed fifty metres down the gravel track and said, "Naessjoe is the red one. We are the yellow one. You are welcome anyway for coffee." We declined, mortified, and scurried away like naughty schoolchildren.

Our actual cabin, when we finally reached it, sat right on the edge of Lake Noemmen looking like something from a postcard that had been left out in the rain a bit. The wood was weathered to that perfect silver-grey, and a small jetty jutted into water so still you could see every cloud reflected upside down. But what struck me most was the note pinned to the door. Not a typed inventory or stern rules about bin collection, but a handwritten message from the owner, a woman called Ingrid who lived in the neighbouring village: "The key is under the frog. He is plastic. Do not be alarmed." Sure enough, a garish green ceramic frog sat by the step, and under his warty bottom lay our entry to the week.

The first evening, determined to make amends for our earlier intrusion, we walked to the tiny village shop for supplies. It was one of those places that sells everything from fishing line to cinnamon buns, run by a man called Gunnar who appeared to be approximately ninety and wore a flat cap that had seen better decades. I asked for milk in my phrasebook Swedish, and he responded with a ten-minute monologue about his cousin in Manchester, whom he had visited once in 1973 and still talked about like it was last Tuesday. "Rain," he said, shaking his head with genuine sympathy. "So much rain. But the football, very good." I understood perhaps one word in five, but nodded along like a dashboard dog.

By day three we had accumulated what I can only describe as a cast of characters. There was Britt-Marie, who cleaned the neighbouring cabins and took a fierce interest in our cooking arrangements, appearing at our window to critique my attempt at pyttipanna with the intensity of a Michelin inspector. "Too much onion," she declared, though she accepted a plate anyway and ate it standing up, telling us about her grandson who had moved to Stockholm and become "too modern." She said this with the same disdain I reserve for people who put pineapple on pizza.

Then came the fishermen. Every morning at dawn, three brothers called something that sounded like "Yonas, Yonas, and Yonas" would putter past in a boat the colour of a faded bruise. They never caught anything visible, but waved enthusiastically and once presented us with a jar of pickled herring that I suspect had been in their family since the 1980s. We ate it out of politeness. It tasted like the sea's grumpy uncle.

The turning point came at the village's Midsummer Eve gathering, which we stumbled upon entirely by accident, following the sound of accordion music through the woods. There was Lars again, my eyebrow friend from the wrong cabin, now wearing a flower crown with magnificent unconcern. He greeted us like old comrades, introduced us to his wife who immediately asked if we were "the English who cannot read numbers," and pressed a glass of schnapps into each of our hands before we could protest. We danced around the maypole with the coordination of newborn giraffes while locals cheered with what I choose to believe was encouragement rather than mockery.

What stays with me, more than the pristine lake or the midnight sun painting everything gold, is how these strangers treated our incompetence. In Britain, barging into someone's home might earn you a stern letter from the council. In Smaland, it made you part of something. By week's end, Gunnar was saving us his best buns. Britt-Marie had adopted us as a personal project, leaving fresh eggs on our step with handwritten instructions. Even the three Jonases slowed their boat to shout weather forecasts as they passed.

I arrived at Naessjoe thinking I was renting a cabin. I left feeling I had accidentally joined a very small, very particular community, one that tolerates lost English people with plastic frogs and no sense of direction. We are already planning our return, though this time I have written the cabin number on my hand in permanent marker. Some lessons, as Lars would say with those magnificent eyebrows, you only need to learn once.