‘An attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris’ is a book written by Georges Perec and it’s quite wonderful. Perec wrote down everything he could see from a specific viewpoint, which happened to be a public piazza in 1974. He recorded people in the street passing by, the traffic, the birds, a wedding and a later funeral, litter, signs, signals, everything. It’s an elaborate and possibly obsessive glimpse into how the mundane detail can become a series of intimacy and remembrance. As this week in the UK and most of Europe plunge back into ‘lockdown’, or perhaps ‘lock up’ is more appropriate and we all await with shuddering uncertainty the…