When it came, it came with an intensity I hadn’t felt for years. Yes, there’d been moments, flashes, but nothing properly for at least five years.

I began to wonder if a power had been lost – mine or that of this strange, disturbing land in which I live.

Perhaps I’d been too burdened with the harsh realities inflicted upon me that I’d lost the art of quiet sitting, allowing other parts of the brain step up?

But, no. Yesterday, for whatever reason, the veil thinned briefly again and past, present, future all existed at once. Just out of reach but whisperingly, tantalisingly there.

You’ll think I’m fanciful and possibly I am. Perhaps you need to live in La France Profonde, or somewhere equally profonde, where there are few distractions and the land is blood-soaked with the past.

And perhaps a certain set of circumstances has to be in play for the performance to begin. To hear the ‘click’ that signals the overture.

Thinking back to the other occasions, all had been when the sun was at its hottest and a heat haze shimmered on the horizon.

The stillness, common to life deep in the country, became an anticipatory silence, which wasn’t a silence because it had an electric quality to it, like static.

No birds sang, no car passed and the air had a soporific soupiness; a lulling into a dream, without entering the sleep state first.

If you’ve ever seen Picnic at Hanging Rock then the strange atmosphere conjectured will give you an idea of the ‘thinning’ feeling.

It creeps up until you feel that just a slight turn of the head will show you the court of Henri IV in splendid procession on his way to bankrupt all the villages ahead demanding they feed and wine him.

Was that the thrum of horses’ hooves on hard baked-clay? The creak of leather, the tinkle of tiny bells on bridles?

And there, the mumble of voices and laughter trailing away as they pass; horses tails swishing in irritation at the fly bites.

Is that the sound of marching? A squad of Roman Legionnaires out of their camp at Balignac, muttering and cursing those who sent them to this land in the name of Empire?

A salute to Bob Dylan: this star’s reign’s never gonna fall

Or the humbler grunts of a donkey burdened by produce, lashed on by his peasant owner on the way to sell his goods in the thriving market town of Lavit?

Thankfully I have never felt the more immediate past in the shape of the infamous 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich who were billeted across the river before their murderous journey north to Oradour-sur-Glane.

They will no doubt have passed in their routing of the Resistance cell 20kms away but there is no sense of their stopping in this settlement of poor farmers.

Perhaps invaded countries have a deeper connection to all that’s gone before and all they fear will come again.

Many of you, like me once, come to France for the joy of simply being still – sitting in a cobbled mediaeval square, shaded by a parasol and likely facing an abbey, as in Moissac, whose tympanum has received World Heritage status.

Only the purring of the collared doves, settled in church niche or clock tower, will break your reverie or rather provide a gentle, soothing backdrop to it.

Maybe, surely, you will imagine then all those who’ve crossed this square over the centuries. But will you feel them? Smell them?

It’s possible, if you return when the tourists have left and dusk curtains all.

You don’t want to look too closely though when the veil thins, for cruelty infects the present as much as it controlled the past.

Under my own parasol, shaded from a 32-degree temperature in June, I look at my neighbours’ wheat fields as the imps – strange wind whips which come from nowhere – twirl in a mad dance.

Behind me I know my house holds no ghosts or terrors beyond the ones I bring with me. Its roof is held up by beams looted in the Revolution and I write in a room where horses were once stabled and cows herded.

When outside I sometimes, rarely, hear the sighs of horses shifting from haunch to haunch; lifting weary hoof up and back down. I smell that glorious sweat all horse-lovers know and wait for the contented munching of day’s end.

But that I know is merely my imagination. The thinning of the veil isn’t.

I used those words once to an English friend I had here. To be horribly honest, I had never imbued her with much sensitivity.

Then I saw recognition at my words in her eyes and her quick nod of assent and a ‘Yes, I know. I feel it often.’

When ‘the click’ happens here I often wonder if, in the future, someone is conscious that if he/she turns quickly enough they will see more than just the feeling of a woman sitting reading.

When I do – as there’s nobody around to see me – I put up a hand and wave to that future, from the present, from the past.