The house is 35 minutes from Le Puy-en-Velay, which is France’s lentil capital. It is a long, low, stone farmhouse and barn from the 17th century, which stretches down a southwest-facing sloping field about 950m up a mountain. A small handful of similar, crumbly agricultural dwellings sit near it on either side of a small asphalt road that swiftly turns to gravel, then to sand.

The mountain the house is on is divided between large tracts of mossy-floored mature spruce, fir and pine plantation and extensive hayfields and pastures. In spring, which properly begins in May up in the mountains, the hayfields become lush and green and the pastures are coloured for several weeks with a changing array of wild flowers. The air is warm and birds and insects are noisy, the potato and the turnip no longer dominate the market and the days are finally long again.

But let me tell you instead about winter, which started soon after I arrived from London.

Winter in the mountains begins in October. The heat of August persists through September before it suddenly gets cold and the days seem abruptly to shorten. Soon, the insulation level of the house became apparent. I layered. Life turned inwards. I quickly got used to a daily pattern of video conferences and writing interspersed with walks into the forest.

It became essential to begin each day with the same 75-minute loop, the same way a morning coffee at the start of the commute was, albeit many years ago, something once that felt essential. Small and otherwise unnoticeable things and changes become perceptible when walking the same trail at the same time again and again.

A piece of bread on a rock was left untouched by wildlife for more than a week. A stray deciduous tree in a stand of dark pines slowly, then quickly, went from green to gold before losing its leaves overnight. A cluster of tiny sulphur nubbins gradually expanded into a patch of yellowfoot chanterelles. About every other day, I would come across two hunting dogs, both pointers, on their daily walk in the woods and exchange a friendly but remote wave with their owner in the distance.

More than a year later, the same pattern of daily life persists. Being on video calls every day naturally prevents a sense of post-apocalyptic total isolation, as does sporadic travel for work and play. But, working nearly entirely remotely in this way from this middle-of-nowhere mountain, it is impossible to replicate the diversity and pace of big-city living. There is no pub on the corner for after-work pints. The nearest good restaurant is at least an hour away.

Instead, days and nights are a sequence of more or less the same things happening at more or less the same times. Every evening after work, I make dinner from vegetables, dairy and meat produced nearby. Some things come from a neighbour who occasionally knocks on the door, selling enormous leeks, carrots and cabbages from her potager. The rest I pick up on my weekly trip off-mountain to the Saturday market in a town that can be considered “big” only in a region rich in tiny hamlets. My cooking explores the many minuscule variations on the theme of chickpeas and/or lentils and rough pork sausage and the possibilities that arise from re-heating assorted remnants from previous days’ meals.

Nearly every night, I stand at the kitchen island reading over dinner, an extension of my preference for eating standing up at the bar in restaurants. I have renewed my acquaintance with the Nero Wolfe stories by Mr Rex Stout, which I recommend – and there are more than 70 of them. On cold nights, I like to continue reading by the wood-burning stove after dinner. Every morning brings fresh revelation of where the mice have been the night before. A friendly asp viper, which moved in under the kitchen sink, has reduced the mouse problem a little.

I was born in Singapore, which is a big city on a small island, then moved to the US where I lived in Cambridge and San Francisco, then to London. I had never previously lived anywhere but in or near a big city. A good life without the scale and pace of urban social interaction was previously almost inconceivable. When I moved to the Auvergne my days filled up instead with things that, written down as I have done, sound unbearably trivial and tedious. Being on your own for days or weeks at a time is not for everyone.

There is no way to know in advance if this kind of life is right for you while living in a city surrounded by millions of people. For me, the only way I found out was by moving to the middle of nowhere. It quickly became obvious that I had to reexamine the meaning of the good life, because the socially constructed version of it wasn’t available.

Deconstructing an idea of self and identity developed over several decades of urban life takes at least a winter. The biggest bill of work is relearning (or possibly just learning) how to pay attention to the signals of what matters personally and what doesn’t. These signals are quiet and I was out of practice from living in cities where such signals were always undetectable under the sound of other people vigorously living their own ideas of the good life.

Does watching cows grazing at the bottom of the field energise me more than an evening at my favourite London bar? It was hard to tell at first, but I now think so. Going remote highlighted how many of the attractions of city life were attractive only because other people thought so — and how I’d never had the chance to be forced to ask whether I found them attractive or not. Because it’s much quieter in the middle of nowhere, I’ve found it easier not to mistake other people’s thoughts and beliefs for my own. Here, where there is almost no one and almost nothing happens, small and otherwise unnoticeable things and changes have become perceptible. And, now that spring has come round again, it’s possible to have a sunset beer outside the house while looking down the slope at grazing cattle. They make a sound like Velcro.