The trouble with Swedish satnavs, I have decided, is that they are far too polite. Mine waited until I was properly committed to a forestry track outside Kramfors before mentioning, in that clipped digital tone, that I might want to turn around. By then I had already bounced through three potholes, startled a hare the size of a small dog, and convinced myself that "Astoen" was either a myth or a practical joke arranged by my brother-in-law.

I was hunting for a holiday cottage on a private island, you see, which sounds terribly glamorous until you realise that in Vasternorrland "private island" often means "rocky outcrop with excellent mosquitoes and a slightly concerning compost toilet." The satnav finally gave up entirely somewhere near the mouth of the Angermanalven, leaving me to navigate by the ancient Swedish method of following the least terrifying gravel road and hoping for the best.

I found the right turning eventually, marked by a hand-painted sign that appeared to have been decorated by an enthusiastic child with limited access to straight lines. A narrow causeway led across to Astoen itself, and I inched across it with the caution of a man who has already reversed once that afternoon into what he desperately hoped was a drainage ditch and not someone's carefully maintained lingonberry patch. The island revealed itself slowly: granite outcrops, wind-sculpted pines, and a red wooden cottage that looked as though it had grown there rather than been built.

My first human contact came in the form of Bengt, who emerged from the neighbouring cottage with a fishing rod and the resigned expression of a man who has watched many Englishmen attempt Scandinavian driving. He was seventyish, dressed in trousers that had clearly never encountered an iron, and spoke English with the peculiar precision of someone who learned it from BBC World Service broadcasts during the Cold War.

"You are the new one," he announced, which felt both accurate and faintly ominous. "I saw you on the road. You drive like my wife." He paused to let this land. "She has been dead twelve years."

I offered what I hoped was a suitably sympathetic grimace, and Bengt softened immediately, launching into a detailed critique of my approach to the causeway. Apparently I had taken it "like a tourist," which involved too much braking and insufficient commitment. The proper method, he explained, was to maintain steady speed and trust in God, though he phrased this with such cheerful fatalism that I suspected his religious convictions were largely theoretical.

He insisted on showing me the proper way to handle the rowing boat, which involved a ten-minute lecture on oar angles while his own boat drifted slowly across the inlet without him in it. "You see?" he said, though I was not entirely sure what I was meant to be seeing. "It is simple. You are maybe too thinking." This felt less like boating advice and more like a general assessment of my character.

By evening I had also met his daughter Lena, who arrived with a casserole and the brisk efficiency of someone who has spent decades managing Bengt-related incidents. She apologised for her father twice before he had actually done anything requiring apology, then caught herself and laughed. "He is not so bad," she said, in the tone of someone repeating a mantra. "He taught you the boat? Good. Last summer he taught a German man who fell in the water. The German was very angry." She considered this. "Bengt was also angry. He had to fish him out."

The casserole was excellent, heavy on root vegetables and lighter on conversation, though Lena did extract from me that I was recently separated, which she announced with the satisfaction of someone solving a puzzle. "You came alone to an island," she said. "This is either healing or hiding." Before I could determine which applied, she had packed her dishes and departed with a warning about the compost toilet that managed to be both practical and faintly threatening.

That first night I sat on the cottage porch with a cup of tea that went cold too quickly, watching the light linger absurdly on the water. Bengt had reappeared briefly to demonstrate the correct method of mosquito swatting ("you must commit, like the causeway"), then wandered off muttering about pike. I thought about Lena's healing-versus-hiding formulation and decided, with the comfortable melancholy of the recently single, that I was attempting both simultaneously and achieving neither with any particular distinction.

The island made small noises around me: water lapping, something plopping into the inlet that I chose to believe was a fish, the distant putter of Bengt's outboard as he conducted what appeared to be entirely unnecessary nocturnal fishing. I had arrived expecting solitude and found instead this peculiar semi-community, these watchful neighbours with their unsolicited advice and unexpected casseroles. It was not what I had planned. The satnav would never have approved. But sitting there, slightly cold, slightly uncertain, I felt something unfamiliar settling in my chest that might, with sufficient generosity, be interpreted as peace.