The thing that really fascinates me about solitude is the need to talk about it. The contradiction seems lost on people. ‘I must tell you about the silent retreat I’ve just been on.’ ‘It was so nice to just sit with my thoughts for a bit.’ Solitude is the new wild swimming: if you don’t talk about it, did it even happen?

And I fear this habit is about to get a whole lot more irritating because the benefits of solitude – all fairly predictable – are increasingly being ‘studied’ and presented in quasi-scientific jargon. ‘It creates spiritual sustenance,’ writes entrepreneur and author Ari Weinzweig. ‘We need to recognise its benefits and see it as a positive choice – not something that happens to us,’ explains Dr Thuy-vy Nguyen, from Durham University’s department of psychology.

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