I’d barely got the car parked outside The Wren when I managed to lock the keys inside with the engine still running. Typical. A passing chap in a flat cap – turns out his name was Dai – wandered over with a coat hanger and a story about the time he’d done the same thing outside Llandudno pier. Within minutes we were swapping travel tales while he fished the lock, and before I knew it half the street seemed to have joined in.

Mrs Probert from two doors down appeared with a tray of tea, insisting the kettle had “just boiled anyway,” and promptly asked whether I’d come for the quiet or the seagulls. I admitted I wasn’t sure yet, which made her chuckle and declare that nobody ever was until the third day. Her neighbour, a retired fisherman called Glyn, leaned on the low wall and offered the tip that the best chips weren’t in town at all but from a van that parked by the lifeboat station around teatime. When I asked how he knew, he winked and said the driver was his son-in-law and the portions were generous if you remembered his name was Rhys with a “y.”

By the time Dai had the door open, I’d heard about the annual sandcastle contest that nobody ever wins because the tide always cheats, and about the woman who once tried to walk her corgi along the beach in wellies three sizes too big. Everyone seemed to know everyone else’s business and were perfectly happy for me to know it too. I stood there with my bag still in the boot, wondering whether I’d actually come for a rest or simply to be adopted for a weekend.

Inside, The Wren felt exactly like the sort of place where stories collect. The kettle whistled almost as soon as I flicked it on, as if the cottage itself had been listening to the gossip outside. From the little window above the sink I could see the same group still chatting on the pavement, now debating whether the new beach café would last longer than the last one. I caught myself smiling at how quickly strangers had turned into local experts on everything from parking to pastry.

Later, when I wandered down for those promised chips, Glyn’s son-in-law remembered my face from the key incident and slipped an extra battered sausage into the bag “for the journey.” Walking back along the prom, watching the tide slip in under a pinkish sky, I realised the mishap with the keys hadn’t just got me into the cottage; it had got me into Conwy. Maybe that was the point of arriving somewhere new – not the cottage itself, but the ten-minute conversation that turns into an invitation to belong, if only until Monday.