The bank, the post office, the dentist, the big garage and the petanque court are all to be found on the village's Boulevard des Amoureux.

I don't know how it got its name, but just before the short street ends, it slopes into a lower walk around a pleasant, tree-shaded parc.

Perhaps lovers, or would-be lovers, escaped the confines of the family farm to snatch an hour or two in its hidden corners? Perhaps blood was spilled here when two such were discovered?

So far I have found no explanation for the name, and in truth don't want to, as the imagination creates the better story.

There are benches here, but it's mainly used as a short cut to the primary school. Often crocodiles of children carrying sketchbooks cross its path after open-air lessons on heritage.

Heritage, local heritage, is an important part of early education and one frequently sees small children around the war memorial, or the remnants of a long-gone chateau which backed on to the Boulevard des Amoureux.

Young teachers talk earnestly to enraptured, upturned faces of infants who then do their best to draw what they see.

So, because of the above, the magnolia-dotted street is one of our busiest thoroughfares - which isn't saying much.

From the day I arrived here and waited for the keys for Las Molieres in the estate agent's dismal flat I'd rented, which also backed on to the street, I've been aware of an old lady.

Tall for this area, she cuts a quite imposing figure with grey hair in an old-fashioned waved bob, kept in place with clips above the ear.

Her clothes change with the seasons but are a cut above the leggings and cumbersome jackets of most of the women.

I've seen her in a superbly tailored tweed suit, in a fitted "costume" of linen and even in a Loden coat.

Sometimes - on her bad days, I think - she wears true carpet slippers, but usually her long feet are in fine leather pumps or occasionally a kitten heel.

I know she lives in one of the terraced houses for I've also seen her, coatless, leaning against the doorjamb; eyes searching.

But usually she just walks, sits for a time and walks again, up and down, up and down.

I've given her a story because, and this is when I wonder if I imagine her, nobody seems to recognise the woman I ask about. Maybe I'm asking the wrong people.

Living alone with no kin in La Lomagne, I've decided, she walks the boulevard for life; for contact; for reassurance that she exists.

By exiting the house where the clock ticks and the air hangs heavy with loneliness, she becomes a player in a moving scene.

Every car is peered into and she hesitantly acknowledges a raised hand. Pass her on foot and call "Bonjour," she'll respond with a timid smile but take it no further. Indeed, something in her look warns one not to.

And on she walks, and sits. And walks and sits, until the night drives her in.

Not too far further on at the roundabout with its stuttering fountain, another woman used to do something similar, emerging from a squatter, less elegant house.

Often she'd simply thrown a coat over her nightdress or wore a floral wrap-around pinny; her feet always in slippers.

Usually she swept the pavement in front of her house and one realised that this woman had issues far beyond mere loneliness.

And then she was gone and the shutters remained unopened on the ugly, little house. The For Sale sign went swiftly up and remains, two years on.

By the same roundabout, on the bench beneath the last terraced house out of the village, four men used to sit day in day out.

They crouched, barely speaking, heads swivelling in unison at every car, every tractor that entered and left. Rarely did they smile - merely glower in our unique southern French way.

I privately vowed to, one day, merit, if not a smile, then at least an arm up that I'd passed. It took me five years and by then they'd dwindled to three and then, two.

Last week there was only one in the new spring sunshine and my heart dipped. This morning, thank God, both were there - each year a little more shrunken, a little less 'present' in a way. But there.

Such is the way in life, everywhere. So many stories being played out day after day, including our own.

Maybe it takes the small setting of a rural village anywhere in the world to see them caught in a clear spotlight.

Or is it only city immigrés like me who, after a lifetime of unseeing indifference when caught up in self, are suddenly aware of the small histories?

As a reporter I considered myself a constant, trained observer. And, yes, prided myself on my prowess in sensing the lie and therefore the truth.

How little I knew. It's taken a backwoods village in nowhere important or meaningful to teach me otherwise.

To teach me the strange, unknown, unknowable history of us all.