Broken down into numerical form, deafness is a scary-near-epidemic phenomenon. In the UK 11 million people have hearing loss, with the figure likely to rise to 15.6 million - or one in five of us - by 2035.

Just over a million people have profound hearing loss and at least 24,000 people use signing as their primary language.

Some 25,000 children are born unable to hear fully.

Unlike cancer, diabetes and the numerous other diseases and conditions that affect most if not all of us in some way, deafness and hearing loss fails to register as much as its volume of sufferers might demand.

"It is a handicap that is isolating. If I was wearing glasses or a white stick people would compensate for that. With the deafness, you're sitting here and someone comes up to you and says 'excuse me' and you ignore them. They think 'you rude so and so'," explains Paul Whitcomb, the Audiology Director of the Chingford Specsavers and several other branches across Essex.

I hear both Paul and the chinking of spoons on saucers, chattering coffee drinkers and unhappy babies that fill the Costa we sit in loud and clear.

For me, experience of hearing loss is confined to a particularly congested week following Glastonbury Festival in which the hum of the Pyramid Stage stuck in my ears as a shrill ringing, and watching my dad have his ears syringed by a nurse friend while on holiday.

If not pleasant, neither were lasting or particularly affecting experiences.

Perhaps this is to do with the career I've chosen.

"The navy was the worst for it," Mr Whitcomb continues.

"If you're an engineer or in an engine room, you're in a closed capsule. They tend to have the worst ones, Then the artillery and air force engineers.

"Factories are bad as well. I used to work in Romford a lot and anyone who came from Fords I didn't need to test. You'd know they would have hearing loss."

While modern day health and safety procedures and the ubiquity of ear protectors mean drums are far less likely to perforated now than 30 years ago, people blasting music through earbuds are Mr Whitcomb's "customers of the future" and enough to make up for the country's declining factory population.

The reason I have taken the train to Chigwell is not just to learn the facts of hearing loss however.

I am there to experience it.

Mr Whitcomb ushers me through the presentable Specsaver's shop floor and to the cluttered staffroom out back, sits me down and has a look in my ear.

His enjoyably delicate surveying is quickly exchanged for a hasty clodding of my canal with a cotton bobble on the end of a string which hangs out of my ear.

Then, like a baker turned otolaryngologist, a dollop of blue resin not dissimilar from the material that makes gum shields is squeezed into me

Both done,and I am immediately submerged.

It is far more dramatic an effect than sticking your fingers into your ears. It feels like putting your head under water, but without the comforting knowledge that coming up for breath will stop the eerie effect.

I am left to wait by the reception for a moment to peer round at the shop, heartbeat hammering in my ears. Either I am suffering from hallucinatory symptoms of incredibly early onset sensory deprivation, or I can hear the blood pumping through the veins of my face.

Over the course of the afternoon I would spend only an hour deaf, in that short time walking with Mr Whitcomb to the shops and attempting to buy another cup of coffee.

It is enough for two of the most debilitating aspects of hearing loss to become clear.

The first is, somewhat obviously, the fact that you cannot hear anything.

Twice on our trip to the shops Mr Whitcomb had to stop me from walking out in front of a car, so used have I become to timing my jaywalking to the hum of an engine.

If this is the dangerous aspect, then there is also the inconvenience of having to crane forward towards your companion and squint at their lips.

Perhaps less obvious but far more overwhelming was how embarrassing the whole experience was.

Twice I had to ask the barista in Costas to repeat herself when she asked for milk, prompting her to look at me with a slight air of pity.

Being unsure of whether I was hearing my voice come out of my mouth or instead vibrate through my skull meant volume control was impossible, and shouting in public inevitable.

And worst of all, walking through Chigwell while excruciatingly concious of something no one else can see is to feel a creeping sense of embarrassment and dread; like I had a strand of toilet paper stuck onto my foot.