“Are you a papist?” The poet and art dealer I.M. Birtwistle preferred the direct approach to the topic of faith when the Australian musician Nick Cave came into her celebrated north Norfolk gallery, housed (partly) in a caravan. “I answered that I was not,” Cave recalled. “‘Then where do you get your spirituality from?’ she challenged, and what continued from there was a conversation that lasted the next 10 years.”

Birtwistle, I should explain, had by that stage in her life lost her sight but continued to run the gallery and her artists until her death in 2006. She had sensed – quite correctly, as it happened – a connection with the visitor she couldn’t see.