Days go by here when I don't talk face to face with another person.

Sure, every waking hour is filled with voices, whether from the radio or the television; and, thanks to the internet, I'm in constant interaction with dozens, even hundreds of people. In fact, on the days I do speak to someone it's usually in the tabac or the mini-market and the conversation rarely goes beyond banal pleasantries.

Nobody uses the telephone much any more either. Friends in the area simply email and occasionally we meet for coffee or meals. And over the years the once-weekly calls from old friends in the UK have dwindled or in some cases simply stopped. A Christmas card with a tightly written message of news is sometimes the only contact we have, yet I still think of them as good friends.

My son can't understand why I don't text or accept texts via my phone. It's how he contacts virtually all of his friends. But why should I sit pushing keys when I could just speak to him?

"Because I don't answer my phone," is the reply. Le sigh.

I am having one of those runs at the moment, although a Skype call is planned later in the week. Coming late to Skype, it was amazing to chat to a pal in New York recently and be taken on a tour of her flat; to place her again in my mind.

We poured wine as if we were sitting at my table and spoke for over three hours. That wouldn't have happened had we not been able to see each other's faces and read in the flickers rippling across what needed further gentle questioning or when to back off.

People speak with their faces and their silences as much as their voices and that's why emails and texts are simply not enough.

Of course I am as much to blame as others in my lack of human conversational contact. I have become passive in my time in La France Profonde. I wait for things to happen and am no longer the instigator I used to be.

Why should people exert themselves to come here to see me when I put off their invitations to return to Scotland or other parts? How rarely now do I phone them, instead of waiting for their calls then wondering why I never hear from them?

It doesn't take much for lives to wander off on to different paths and in the end one is left with that handful with whom one can pick up a conversation no matter how many months have passed.

Since I was young I have been aware of men and women - usually old - who seek some reason to touch your arm in a shop. Mostly they ask the size of the jumper they're holding as they've forgotten their glasses. I have always recognised the request as an excuse for them to hear their own voices out loud and have some sort of expression in their long day.

I now also understand why so many of the expats are wedded to their ritual of the twice-weekly market or the various loose groups they make up - not just to hear their own tongue but to unconsciously read the faces and unpick the silences.

Recently I was told of an Englishwoman living in a village 20 miles away. Her story is depressingly familiar around here.

Eighteen months ago her husband died, leaving her alone, childless, at the age of 82. Despite living in France for almost 18 years, she barely gets beyond "Bonjour". And although relatively fit, she never learned to drive and lives in a village without shops of any kind - increasingly common in rural France.

She is entirely dependent on the kindness of a younger Englishwoman who either takes her shopping or does it for her. Doctors' appointments, bill demands or anything to do with the ceaseless bureaucracy are dealt with by the same woman who accompanies and translates for her.

Aware that she is marooned in what to her is now a hostile land, she has put her house on the market. To be frank, her chances of selling these days are slim if not non-existent.

The French farmer who told me all this was amazed.

"She left everything up to her husband," he said. "Everything that involved dealing with us.

"In all these years here she never learned the language. She can't even speak to her neighbours. What sort of a life is that?"

The answer is it is not a life and certainly not one to be endured in her final years. I hope at least her telephone rings or, failing that, she has a grasp of the internet to peer into the wider world. Somehow I doubt it.

Thankfully I am not in her position. I am merely inert, awaiting the world to ring my bell. But to achieve contact beyond the cold, always impersonal email or grammatically mangled text, it's necessary to actively seek it.

However marvellous these communications are in their own way, and better than nothing, they will never substitute for the reading of faces and the eloquence of silence.