Here’s how deafness comes as a shadow, as a shaving of tones, as the death of direction, as a retreat to a sonic island, the middle ground. I want to say it’s like having cotton wool in your ears, or like swimming underwater. But it still has its moments: I’m startled by someone talking out-loud, shouting, at someone who is not there. In 1926 we would have avoided him, left him to those inner voices, rattling in his head. But now I’m pulled towards him, hoping to hear some snippets of salacious gossip, some intimacy revealed, some accusation spat, into the latest Nokia. But perhaps if you had stood here looking at the façade in 1926 in deep snow, the globes of light wreathed in mist, a haze of neon in long exposure, the throb of lorries on muffled tyres, the odd swish of sledge runners, punctuated by the odd snorting horse, you might, perhaps, begin to imagine how it is, how it is to go deaf.