The previous night, the sky, unlit by street-lights, had been so clear that you felt able to see all the stars in the universe. This though was the morning and a white early-morning mist was covering the valley as I walked out of the house. It was early October and the leaves were starting to change from their normal green to beautifully variegated reds and browns. Some were already on the ground.

The house next door was still empty following the death of our neighbour more than a year previously. Madame Leroulier had lived there with her sister-in-law. Both were characters. The sister-in-law, in her late 60's, couldn't read and was obviously not the brightest of people, but she could be seen gathering fallen branches from the woods down the lane; later on we would hear the sound of her chopping them up for use in their wood-burning stove. Madame Leroulier wore old, worn, but clean clothes, was deaf, had few teeth and was in her eighties when we first got to know her. She used to work at Le Chameau, the local boot factory.

Although her French was spoken in a heavily-accented local dialect, over the years I got to understand her more easily. She was always eager to have a chat, tell me rude jokes which I only half understood and then hide her giggles and her teeth behind her hands. She would complain about her late husband, who was an alcoholic, but with whom, over the years, as money allowed, she had built the house now standing there. She gathered apples from our orchard and used them to make cider, cider later turned into Calvados with the aid of the mobile still, looking and puffing like an old traction engine, which used to turn up in late October. But, sadly, no more. And no more Calvados brought to us as a thank you for the apples.

As I walked in the opposite direction, along the lane towards the main road, the mist-obscured timbers of the frame of a new home being built on the other side of our house came more clearly into view. It was to be a 'green' house. Although quite how, it was difficult to say. The massive base, complete with sous-sol, had required very many tonnes of concrete. Not the greenest way to start.

Turning left out of the lane, I walked down the road towards the town and once again passed the front of a shop which combined the selling of gifts and the repair of clocks and watches. Or at least it had done. For the items displayed in the shop front had barely changed in years. Some of the wine glasses had been moved from time to time: you could see this from the rings in the dust where they used to be in fact, now that I counted them, they were in three different positions. There were nine tiny glasses for digestives on a chequer board, each with either an X or an O on them. There was a die-cast model of the sort of German 2nd world war car used by Hitler, but with a clock on the side and a model of a Casablanca style twin prop plane, again with a clock inset. There was the movement of a grandfather clock on the counter and there were wristwatches and alarm clocks on one of the glass shelves. Mysteriously, all of the five alarm clocks told the same time apart from one; the group of seven watches all told the same time apart from one of them which, strangely, since the previous day, had started working. Clearly, all of these things represented in the mind of the shop-owner a code which conveyed a sinister message to passing spies.

Further into the village, there was a funeral at the church, a church, which like so many others in the region, was rebuilt after the destruction of the original in the bombing by the Allies at the end of the war. Large black cars were drawn up outside. A group of six substantial men from the undertakers looked uncomfortable in their tight-fitting dark blue suits, white shirts and dark ties. One was talking intently on his mobile phone. Had they brought the wrong body? Or was there no priest? The old priest himself, a pleasant man with a beard, copied from those of the saints in the stained glass windows, had died in the Spring leaving his lay (female) assistant to officiate in the Church. His camping car was usually parked just outside the Church. What it was doing there was difficult to say, although at the bar of the Hôtel de la Place there was salacious gossip about its use  -  I am sure quite unjustified.

The Bar de lîle, on the other side of the road from the Church was open and a yellowish mist of cigarette smoke wafted out of the wide-open door, although none of the chilly plastic seats outside was taken.

I continued towards the newsagent and passed the now deserted butchers shop. For as many years as anyone could remember it was run by les frères Legout (appropriately "Le gout" means "the taste"). One day they simply closed the shop, but left the top half of the front door permanently open, albeit with the grill covering the entrance. Through the grill and the dusty windows, could and can still be seen, even now, the half-open doors of the walk-in fridges, the chopping blocks, display cabinets, scales and, hanging from the ceiling, their old certificates proclaiming their triumphs over the years in the Triperie dOr annual competition. People came from far and wide to buy their Tripe à la mode de Caen kept in the chiller cabinet by the main shop window. The brothers' age and the inexorable march of regulation eventually caught up with them and brought to an end a business which produced meat of the highest quality and of a flavour not generally found in les Grandes Surfaces.

Amongst the magazines detailing the lives, loves and divorces of les People, who were that particular day mainly French film stars and Monegasque and Spanish royalty, the newsagent also sold the previous days Times, Telegraph and Daily Mail, although they had that days edition of the Guardian. But then Normandy is largely a Socialist area.

Coming out of the shop, the sun had finally emerged. Retracing my route, I saw that the owner of the Bar was extending the sun-awning and customers were starting to sit at the outside tables, although the yellow smoke still slowly oozed out of the front door. The black cars were driving away from the Church but I took an alternative route, walking back through the sun-lit park at the side of the River Orne, in order to avoid feeling the pressure once more to wear dark glasses, turn up my collar in true spy style and crack the code in the watch-repairers shop.

Instead I briefly watched a game of boules being played by portly, Normandy-moustachioed men, then went home for a cup of tea and read about what had been going on in the world which exists outside the town of Pont d'Ouilly. For there is such a world, somewhere.