I have never been so grateful for a cup of tea in my entire life, and I had not even had the tea yet. That is the thing about driving to Mellerud in West Gothland, Sweden. You think you are prepared. You think, "I have driven on the right before, I will be fine." And then you spend twenty minutes circling a roundabout in Trollhattan because your satnav has decided you need to see every possible exit twice, and a local in a Volvo waves at you with what I can only describe as sympathetic amusement.

The mishap came at the petrol station just outside town. I pulled in, smug that I had survived the roundabouts, and proceeded to fill the car with what I was absolutely certain was unleaded. A very tall man in overalls tapped my shoulder. He said nothing. Just pointed at the nozzle, then at the little picture of a boat on the pump, then at me, then raised his eyebrows so slowly it felt like performance art. I had been filling the hire car with marine diesel. For boats. I was not near a boat. I was near embarrassment, and a lot of it.

He introduced himself as Lars. Lars did not laugh at me, which somehow made it worse. He helped me sort it out with the station attendant, a woman called Birgit who looked like she had seen this exact situation approximately four hundred times before. "English?" she asked. I nodded. She said something in Swedish to Lars that made him grin, then translated: "She says the English always find new ways to use our petrol." I chose to take this as cultural exchange.

By the time I actually reached the holiday property in Mellerud, I was two hours late and smelled faintly of fuel and shame. The key was in a lockbox, which was straightforward enough, but I was so frazzled that I walked straight into the garden shed thinking it was a very compact Scandinavian outhouse. It was not. It was a shed. A very tidy shed, with labelled jars of preserved berries and a framed photograph of a dog wearing a bandana. I backed out slowly and found the actual property, which was charming, wooden, and mercifully not full of someone else's preserves.

I made that cup of tea. I sat on the little deck overlooking the lake, and I watched a man in the neighbouring property attempt to teach a very large dog to fetch a stick. The dog was not interested in fetching. The man was called Per, I learned later, and the dog was called Knut. Per spoke to Knut with the patient resignation of someone who had long ago accepted that their relationship was not about obedience but about mutual tolerance. "He is a thinker," Per told me, when we eventually spoke over the fence. "He thinks about not fetching." I liked Per immediately.

That first evening, I walked down to the little harbour area, still slightly shell-shocked from my diesel adventure. A group of pensioners were sitting on a bench with folding chairs and thermoses, watching the water do absolutely nothing. They made room for me without asking, which is the Swedish way of asking. One of them, Ingrid, explained that they came every evening to "supervise the sunset." She said it with complete seriousness, as if the sun might set incorrectly without their oversight. Another, Gunnar, offered me a biscuit from a tin that had definitely held sewing supplies in a previous life. It tasted of aniseed and nostalgia.

I told them about the marine diesel. Ingrid nodded slowly and said, "Lars at the petrol station? He will remember you. He remembers everyone. It is his hobby." Gunnar added that Lars had once helped a German tourist who had filled his car with windshield washer fluid. "You are not the worst," he said, which I understood to be Swedish for "you are among friends."

Walking back in the half-light, with the lake absolutely flat and the mosquitoes just beginning their evening shift, I felt something shift. The mishap was not a mishap anymore. It was a story. It was how I met Lars, and Birgit, and how I would later meet Per properly, and how I was now apparently part of a sunset supervision committee. The property itself was lovely, warm wood and clean lines and that particular Scandinavian competence that makes you feel slightly inadequate about your own home. But it was the people, the accidental encounters, the raised eyebrows and the aniseed biscuits, that had already made the place feel like somewhere I belonged.

I still checked the pump labels very carefully after that, though. Twice.