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What happens in a tiny village during a pandemic?

I first had the idea for this collection of interviews about nine weeks into lockdown, after Piddlehinton was featured on the BBC News as an example of a village that had really come together as a community.

The village had already changed – not least because of the WhatsApp group, consisting of around 75 people, which did so much to bring us together.

From posts lamenting a lack of red tomatoes – prompting helpful tips on how to move them on from green – to the offer of a recently shed python skin (snapped up by the local school); to daily monitoring of the earliest times that lorries once again began to thunder along the road… if you wanted to know what was going on in Piddlehinton, WhatsApp was the place to find out.

Watching the piece on the BBC, then reading the group messages afterwards, it occurred to me that Covid 19 might not just mean sitting at home for an indefinite number of weeks; for some it could constitute something quite profound.

So I decided to set off around the village to find out. And my husband Pete, who’s a fabulous photographer, was kind enough to follow.

Jess Morency, July 2020