I have to tell you about the time I nearly drove straight past Duse Udde. There I was, pootling along some forest road in Varmland, absolutely convinced my satnav had finally lost the plot, when I spotted a tiny hand-painted sign that looked like it had been nailed up sometime in the 1980s and forgotten about. I slammed on the brakes, the hire car did that alarming lurch thing, and my cup of petrol station coffee went absolutely everywhere. Brown liquid dripping off the dashboard, my trousers looking like I'd had a small accident. Not my finest hour.

The chap who came out to greet me was Sten, the property manager, who took one look at me and said, "Ah, you found the sign then. Most people drive to Norway by mistake." He said this with the straightest face imaginable, then burst out laughing and clapped me on my coffee-soaked shoulder. Sten must have been pushing seventy, built like a pine tree, and possessed the most magnificent moustache I have ever seen on a human being. It had its own postcode, that moustache.

He led me down to the lakeside property, chattering away about how his grandfather had built the original boathouse and how he'd been coming to Duse Udde since before I was born. Every few sentences he'd stop, point at some apparently unremarkable patch of water or rock, and declare, "Best fishing in Varmland, that spot. Don't tell anyone." I must have been told this secret location about six times during a ten-minute walk.

The cottage itself was charming in that slightly ramshackle Scandinavian way - red paint, white trim, the whole traditional deal. But it was Sten's running commentary that made the arrival memorable. He showed me the wood-burning stove with the reverence most people reserve for religious artefacts, explaining that his wife Ingrid had once tried to replace it with something "modern and German" and he'd had to put his foot down. "Three days I slept in the boathouse," he said, shaking his head with what I suspect was misplaced pride. "Worth it."

Ingrid appeared shortly after, bearing cinnamon buns that were still warm and looking exactly like you'd hope a Swedish grandmother would look - flour on her cardigan, sharp eyes, thoroughly unimpressed with her husband. She took in my coffee-stained appearance, said something rapid and scolding to Sten in Swedish, then turned to me with perfect English. "He didn't tell you to ignore the first sign and follow the second? No. Of course not. He's been waiting thirty years for someone to actually miss it." Sten looked positively delighted with himself.

The couple across the way came over to introduce themselves too - a retired teacher called Lars and his wife Birgitta, who spent the first ten minutes of our acquaintance trying to give me their spare fishing rod. "You'll want it," Lars insisted, despite my protests that the closest I'd come to fishing was accidentally hooking my own ear as a child. Birgitta just smiled and said, "He does this to everyone. We have fourteen rods now. Please take one." There was something wonderfully matter-of-fact about her desperation.

By the time I actually got inside the cottage, I realised I'd spent nearly an hour just standing about on the grass, chatting with what felt like the entire population of Saffle's more eccentric residents. My coffee had dried into an interesting pattern on my trousers. The lake stretched out before me, properly beautiful in that understated Nordic fashion. And I felt, quite unexpectedly, like I'd arrived somewhere that actually wanted me there, coffee stains and all.

I changed my trousers, opened the windows to let in that particular smell of pine and lake water, and sat on the little wooden deck watching the light change. Sten pottered past in a small boat, waving grandly. Birgitta shouted something across the water that made him laugh. Somewhere, I suspected, Ingrid was watching with her flour-dusted knowingness, keeping everything in order.

That was my first hour at Duse Udde. I didn't catch any fish, I never did work out which spot was the actual secret one, and my trousers never quite recovered. But I felt oddly at home, which is more than you can say for most arrivals, isn't it?