We set off from Truro with the kind of optimism only a Friday afternoon in Cornwall can conjure, windows down and the satnav cheerfully promising twenty minutes to Westaway. Twenty-five minutes later we were still circling Portreath’s one-way system, convinced the cottage was playing hide-and-seek. When the road finally spat us out by the car park, I managed to reverse straight into a low granite wall that had clearly been waiting there since the Tudors. The scrape sounded expensive; the seagull on the wall looked delighted.

Still wincing, I wandered down to the beach café for a consolatory pasty and found myself next to a wiry chap in a faded St Ives rowing club hoodie who introduced himself as Trev. “First time reversing into Cornwall, was it?” he asked, nodding at the guilty scrape now visible on the bumper. Before I could defend myself, a woman called Maureen from the next table chipped in that her Frank had done worse on their honeymoon and the wall had won then too. Within minutes the whole corner of the café was swapping reversing stories like football scores.

Back at Westaway, bags barely unpacked, the landlord’s aunt popped round with a spare key and a warning about the temperamental hot-water switch. She stayed for a cuppa, told us her grandson had learned to surf on exactly the same stretch of sand we could see from the kitchen window, and left us with a Tupperware of saffron buns “for emergencies.” We were still laughing about the buns when a neighbour, Bill, ambled past with his terrier and asked if we needed a tide timetable. Apparently the printed ones in the tourist office were “for visitors”; his handwritten version, scrawled on the back of a Co-op receipt, was far more reliable.

That evening we took the short cliff path into the village for fish and chips. The queue at the takeaway stretched along the harbour wall, and conversations drifted like woodsmoke. A retired lifeboat coxswain called Arthur held court on the bench outside, rating every wave that rolled in and offering running commentary on who’d caught what that morning. When he noticed our scraped bumper he chuckled, “At least you chose the wall and not the harbour,” before offering to lend us touch-up paint from his shed. We declined, but he still wrote his number on a napkin “just in case the wall sues.”

By the time we wandered back along the darkening beach, the tide was slipping out and the ridiculous scrape already felt smaller. Every local we’d met had turned our clumsy arrival into an introduction rather than an embarrassment, and I realised the real welcome at Westaway wasn’t the cottage itself but the running conversation that seemed to start the moment you stepped out of the car.