I should have known the sat-nav was up to no good when it tried to send me through what looked like someone's allotment. There I was, rattling down a gravel track in Varmland with my partner doing that thing where you grip the door handle and breathe very carefully, convinced we were about to become an anecdote at a Swedish dinner party. "Bjorn, remember the English couple who tried to drive through our rhubarb?"

The Langserud itself appeared like a mirage after forty minutes of increasingly doubtful navigation. A proper red wooden cottage with white trim, the sort that makes you feel instantly underdressed in your motorway-stained jeans. I parked with the enthusiasm of someone who has just escaped a minor hostage situation, and promptly tripped over the welcome mat. My partner maintains I was attempting a curtsey to the house itself. I am not ruling it out.

Our neighbour Ulf appeared before I'd finished brushing gravel from my palms. He was seventy-ish, wearing overalls that had seen genuine agricultural action, and carried a mug of coffee that could have qualified as a family heirloom. "You took the scenic route," he said, which I now understand is Swedish for "you absolute plum." Within minutes he was explaining the water pump with the patient sadness of a man who has explained many water pumps to many English people. I nodded along, understanding perhaps one word in seven, mostly "och" and "ja."

The pump, naturally, defeated me within hours. I found Ulf again down by his shed, which he referred to as his "thinking place" though it smelled strongly of petrol and philosophy. He came over without sighing, which I took as a personal victory, and demonstrated the priming technique while telling me about his brother in Karlstad who once flooded a similar cottage trying to install a dishwasher. "Technology," Ulf said, with the weight of a man who has buried several appliances.

By day three I had become a minor celebrity at the village shop, which is also the post office, which is also somehow where you collect fishing permits. The woman behind the counter, Ingrid, had a laugh like a door hinge in need of oiling and absolutely no patience for my attempts to pronounce "kanelbulle." She would simply hold up the cinnamon bun and wait for me to point, like communicating with a well-meaning toddler. On my fourth visit she started preparing my coffee before I reached the counter, which felt like receiving the keys to the city.

The baker who supplies the shop, a chap called Henrik with flour permanently embedded in his eyebrows, turned up one morning while I was loitering by the bread shelf. He wanted to know if English people genuinely ate beans for breakfast, and seemed faintly disappointed that I confirmed it. "With toast?" he asked, as if this might be the mitigating factor. I felt the weight of national responsibility and found myself defending it with more passion than I have ever actually felt about beans.

Evenings at the Langserud settled into a rhythm of card games and Ulf's occasional appearances with surplus vegetables. He never knocked, simply materialised with courgettes and opinions about the weather. My partner started keeping the kettle permanently warm. I found myself listening for his gravel crunch the way one might listen for a favourite song.

On our final morning, Ingrid presented me with a kanelbulle in a paper bag without charge. "For the beans man," she said, and I felt something complicated happen in my chest. We had arrived as bumbling intruders, satellite-navigated fools with no grasp of water pumps or Swedish vowels. We left as something else, something with a name in a village where everyone already knew it.