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I’ve been gone, fishing for locations. Back in the day, a recce was closer to the military function it refers to. You’d go to see places, camouflaged as a tourist. People would look and comment and perhaps contact the authorities on spotting you crouched on a corner by the bins, or gazing up bedroom windows, muttering to colleagues.

The new reality is the video recce. Tourists take photos, but they don’t wander down the middle of the street talking to themselves. Last week, in an Italian hill village I was, I thought, unobserved. But on meeting the local priest to discuss a possible interview, I had the distinct feeling that he’d already been tipped off by neighbours who’d watched with suspicion what I’d thought was covert surveillance.

Back home, my phone is clogged with micro-clips of wanderings down backstreets, snatches of blurred vegetation on autostrada where we might record pieces to camera, and corners of rooms where a tripod might fit. Curiously, in playback they are much more pungent than written notes used to be, fragments of time preserved, transport back. I hope to God the actual film will be as satisfying.