‘Well, I’ve found it really useful.” Elizabeth has been regaling us with her experiences of attending a mindfulness course and has met with some scepticism, predictably from Charlie, although Joyce was none too enthusiastic either, which was why Elizabeth had concluded on a defiant note.

“Just get on with it, I say … bit too Maharishi for me … reckon a good malt is just as effective,” were typical of the objections.

From my limited understanding of it – two introductory sessions – mindfulness is a stress-busting therapy. Tailor-made for us crumblies, then; the last few yards are uphill all the way. Its slogan of “living in the moment” is equally apposite, as that’s where we live, unable to remember what happened last, what comes next.

So I do not doubt its efficacy; I’m sure that conscientiously undertaken, mindfulness does exactly what it says on the tin. No, my problem is its legitimacy.

Mindfulness has previous. It is the grandchild of two earlier therapies, samatha and ataraxia, Buddhist and Epicurean strategies for avoiding perturbation. It also owes authority to the Christian “peace of God”.

They are all products of systems whose business is suffering and how to minimise it. While they may have avoided recommending death, they have traditionally commended avoiding life, providing instead a holy resignation to the world’s pain and holy insulation against it.

Perhaps that is why mindfulness is so attractive. It endorses disengagement. Most recently, I experienced it being articulated at a seminar by a guru who insisted that no human is of any use to another unless they were first totally at ease in themselves.

That is surely a profound fallacy. If I am to be of any use to another when they are in trouble, I must join them in it. I must share the pain. I must experience the distress.

Far from being at peace with myself, I have to leave the self behind and be disturbed by the “other”. I must live in their moment.

We elderly have a unique take on this. As we approach the midnight hour, we can look back at our brief day and what stands out are not the moments of tranquillity, contentment, being at peace; what has made our lives worthwhile has been the stress, disturbance, the crises, the traumas, the heartaches, the helter-skelter rollercoaster of life, those shared moments of perturbation.

So disturbance is to be welcomed; it shows that we are alive, that we care, that we belong, that we have taken part. Surely no one wants to be remembered for having led a quiet life.

After all, when we’ve gone, whether into thin air, under the ground or to “another country”, there will be more than enough time for peace and quiet.

With its emphasis on personal detachment, mindfulness seems to this old man to undermine the social literacy that is the human genius. We possess the empathy to imagine, to be in another’s shoes.

And that literacy is especially needed in the modern world. With a food bank in every town, a Big Issue seller on every street and strangers clamouring at the gates, it is just plain wrong to seek a life of mindful calm.

But sadly fashionable. Mindfulness is indeed a therapy for our narcissistic time. It provides toxic endorsement of the selfie culture, where the priority of personal self-actualisation comes before all else, where emotional literacy has conceded to a preoccupation with self.

Mind full, heart empty, you could say.