A VAN delivering hot tubs cruised through the village when snow was still lying. Clearly its satnav was no help. It passed, and turned, and passed again, the driver squinting to read house names. We were interested. Who in these Baltic conditions would be in need of an outdoor hot tub?

A week or so later the van returned, presumably with a different driver, and once more prowled up and down, like TV licence patrollers in days of yore.

Lest you think I do nothing but stare out of the window, like neighbourhood watch, you would not be entirely wrong. In the depths of winter, the kitchen table is the warmest place to work.

It has the advantage of being near the boiler, and the disadvantage that if anything goes on outside – an icicle forming, a blackbird alighting on a branch – it is easy to be distracted.

Now that spring is here, I am back in my study upstairs, where work proceeds faster, but the doings of the village pass wholly unobserved. Morris dancers could be digging divots on the village green and I’d know nothing about it.

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As I sat down to write this, two white horses plodded past, a perfect pair that ought to be pulling a carriage. They were followed by a glossy carthorse, heading the other way. Unlike a young rider yesterday, who was scrolling her phone as she rode at a snail’s pace, these equestrians have all their wits about them. I mention this flurry of four-legged traffic because the Christmas before last I was given a copy of the experimental French novelist Georges Perec’s book, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris.

Perec was no ordinary writer. He once wrote a long novel without using the letter e. Imagin how hard that must hav bn. In October, 1974, he spent a long weekend in various cafés in Saint-Sulpice, a district near Saint-Germain where I have stayed a few times. His book is a prosaic record of who and what passes by during his vigils: ‘It is five to six. A man took out a dolly from a blue van, loaded it with different cleaning products, and pushed it down rue des Canettes. Outside you can barely even make out the faces anymore… An almost empty 96 goes by. A police car goes by and turns in front of the church square. An empty 86 and a moderately full 87 go by. The bells of Saint-Sulpice begin to ring…’ Perec came to the conclusion that he had missed his vocation, as ticket collector for the Paris City Transport Authority.

Having often stopped for coffee in the same cafés, I thought I’d put in a shift at our kitchen window. It was a Friday morning. Before breakfast, an oil tanker had called at neighbours, whose previous delivery had been wrongly apportioned between Aga tank and central heating, leaving them at risk of freezing. A teenage girl had set off for the school bus shortly thereafter, with a heavy bag on her shoulder.

It was a quarter past ten when I settled with a notebook, the sun so bright I had to squint. The early morning frost had long since burned off. Cars around the green were flashing in the brilliance. Normally at this time of year they’d be coated in mud, but these days they’re hardly used. Here’s what happened:

10.18 Woman from the other end of the village returns from walking a neighbour’s dogs, a young black Labrador, and an elderly golden retriever.

Carer emerges in a mask from a house, her plastic apron billowing. She drives off.

A blue car, young man at wheel. The new 20mph limit means you have time to see who’s driving.

A 4x4, the same model as once reversed into us in Achiltibuie, crushing the bonnet.

White car passes, too fast. There’s much consternation in Hoolet at the speed people drive. When there was a ramp for roadworks last autumn, a young father of two heard a speedster race over it in his souped-up motor, followed by a crunch as something in the undercarriage disintegrated.

10.34 Local shuttlebus passes, driver like a white-beaked puffin in his mask. One passenger, seats cordoned off by red and white tape.

10.40 Farm trailer with dead sheep, hooves in air.

Young woman, wearing earbuds, walking a spaniel.

10.54 Van from the donkey sanctuary.

Woman not dressed for Saint-Germain knocks on a neighbour’s door.

Wee car the colour of sludge.

Black car with Whistler’s mother at the wheel.

11.00 Car the colour of crème de menthe.

Van that reconditions electrical appliances.

Farm trailer minus dead sheep.

Red car.

Yellow van.

Man holding phone wearing black mask and camouflage jacket hurrying across the green.

11.10 Neighbour pulling up dead foliage by her front door.

11.14 Volkswagen repair van.

11.19 Professional dog walker’s van parks, and four different breeds leap out. Please don’t come near our grass…

You can see why Georges Perec preferred the city. There were times during that Hoolet hour when it felt as if the world had frozen. Even the birds were AWOL, perhaps sensing surveillance.

Fridays are often busy with local shops delivering sirloin steak, groceries and prescriptions. Throughout the week supermarket vans come and go. In fact, while I was at the window, a woman posted on the village Facebook page that Tesco had wrongly delivered cat litter. Any takers?

But on this of all mornings, nothing of note occurred. I suppose I shouldn’t be so disappointed. After all, despite the crowds thronging the Paris streets, nothing spectacular happened on Perec’s watch either. And that, it seems, was the point. He had gone in search of the ‘infraordinary’, or ‘what happens when nothing happens.’ What he found was not drama, but rhythm, the humdrum turning of the day’s wheel.

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What he also proved was that you can capture the personality of an area by naming the pieces of the jigsaw. Unexciting though individual parts might be, the accumulation of detail creates a picture larger and more colourful than its parts. During Perec’s three-day watch, the series of uneventful happenings builds into a vivid scene.

In Hoolet, it might require longer than an hour staring into the street to give a full flavour of what it’s like to live here. In that respect, it is no different from Saint-Sulpice.

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