In 2019, I found myself having tomato soup with an aged Northumbrian hermit called Harold Palmer. He greeted me, a total stranger, with hands outstretched and an infectious smile on his face beneath his Thomas the Tank Engine bobble hat. Here was a man who had been mostly cut off from the rest of humanity for almost half a century. Yet in the two hours I spent with him, he felt more human to me than anyone I had ever met before. So, I decided to give this business of quiet contemplation a chance.

It was one of the most profound experiences of silence in my life.