I should have known the holiday was going to be characterful when I got my first proper talking-to before even reaching the front door. We'd been driving up from Gothenburg, which sounds straightforward enough on paper, but I'd made the classic error of trusting my phone's pronunciation of Swedish place names. Somewhere around Kil I took a wrong turn and ended up down a forestry track that grew narrower and more apologetic with every metre. By the time I reversed out past a chap in a Volvo who looked like he'd been waiting his whole life for this moment, I was forty minutes late and thoroughly schooled in the art of the Swedish head-shake - a gesture that manages to convey disappointment, pity, and a sort of weary affection all at once.

The property itself sits just outside Gunnarskog, a proper working village where people still do things with their hands and aren't embarrassed about it. I'd barely got the car door open when our neighbour emerged from his shed, which turned out to be his permanent base of operations. Bengt, he said his name was, though he pronounced it in a way that made me immediately forget it again. He was wearing overalls that had seen service through several Swedish governments and was holding a piece of wood as though he'd just interrupted a serious conversation with it.

"You took the forest road," he said. Not a question. A diagnosis.

I admitted it. He looked at the wood, then back at me, as if the wood might have an opinion on the matter.

"The moose use that road," he said. "You are not a moose."

This felt like wisdom I should write down somewhere.

Bengt turned out to be the sort of neighbour who operates on a need-to-know basis regarding his own presence. I'd find him examining our car's tyres with professional concern, or standing by the postbox at what I came to understand was not exactly a coincidence. He never came empty-handed. One morning it was a jar of pickled something that he described only as "from before." Another time it was a fishing rod that he insisted I borrow, though I hadn't mentioned fishing and he hadn't asked if I could.

"Arvika is that way," he'd say, pointing vaguely. "They have shops. Coffee. People who are not moose."

The village shop became my daily pilgrimage, less for supplies than for conversation with Lena, who ran the place with the efficiency of someone who had mentally sorted every human into useful categories decades ago. She spoke English with the precision of someone who had learned it specifically to correct people.

"You want the brown cheese," she told me on my third visit, though I had been reaching for something entirely different. "The other one is for children and morning television hosts."

I bought the brown cheese. She was right, obviously. It was the sort of cheese that made you reconsider your previous cheese commitments.

On the Friday, a chap called Stig appeared at the property's boundary with a dog that looked like it had been assembled from spare parts. Stig himself had the weathered appearance of someone who had spent meaningful time in forests, possibly against his will.

"Bengt says you are learning," Stig said, which I chose to take as encouragement. The dog looked skeptical.

"Learning what, exactly?"

Stig considered this. "Not to be a moose," he said, and laughed for a surprisingly long time.

The dog and I exchanged glances. We understood each other, the dog and I. We were both trying to work out where we fitted in this peculiar ecosystem of straight-talking, overall-wearing, cheese-directing Scandinavians who seemed to have appointed themselves my unofficial committee.

By the second week, I'd stopped trying to be a competent tourist and settled into being an incompetent local. I fished badly with Stig's borrowed rod. I ate Lena's recommended cheeses without argument. I accepted Bengt's appearances as natural phenomena, like weather. When I finally drove back to Gothenburg, I took the proper road, the one with signs, and felt an odd pang of something like homesickness for a place where people had found me wanting and decided to help anyway.

I still have the jar of pickled something. I'm not entirely sure what it is. I'm not entirely sure Bengt was either. But I'm saving it for something important, or possibly for when I need reminding that getting slightly lost can lead you exactly where you needed to be.