A little while earlier I was lying in bed trying to get to sleep.

As usual the fan was whirring.  Well, there was the whir, the additional clinking of the chain that hangs from it and a slight clacking noise that I assume must be internal ball bearings.

On top of that there was the dehumidifier buzzing. On other occasions, at warmer times of the year, there is also the noise of the air conditioner.

And then the dehumidifier stopped dead and the fan slowed.  My phone charging by the bed lit up. It dawned on us the power had stopped.

In the summer, when this happens it is hell.  The heat means you lie there sweating with the choice of losing the net and opening windows to catch the minutest breeze while getting eaten alive, or you continue to dehydrate on damp sheets.

But this time my only discomfort was the silence. Silence is spooky in noisy Hanoi.

My wife, as ever, fell asleep straight away but suddenly I was aware of everything.  My breathing. The compressing of the bed springs as I rolled over.

Our house is down an alley too narrow for cars and while there are houses on all sides, Hanoi sleeps early. If I strained my ears I could just about hear a distant peep every 20 seconds or so from the dike road a few hundred yards away. I could just make out the generators from our neighbours at the Sheraton.

But for the most part the silence was overwhelming.

I’ve heard of Vietnamese simply not being able to stand the silence on trips overseas.  A friend who went to study in my home city of Newcastle called it incredibly quiet. I’ve heard Newcastle called a lot of things but never quiet.

There was a time in my life, not such a happy time, when I realised I had developed the habit of turning on the TV or radio on entering every room.  I came to the conclusion that it was a way of jamming my brain to stop myself mulling over problems. About the same time I realised that walking home from work gave me unwanted thinking time.

Here it’s hard to miss the Vietnamese compulsion to create noise.  The peeping on the roads is obvious, less so is the constant clicking of safety belt catches on planes or a TV blaring in the background of a shop. The tinny speaker of a mobile phone between a group of teenagers by the lake.

So much of modern noise is now created by the constant building and development but is this largely tolerated as part of a acceptance, culture and even welcoming of noise?

If noise has become a habit what started this?

Did Hanoi too have a less happy time when noise was a way of banishing thoughts and fears?  Did the speakers, the peeping, the karaoke sessions, the drumming fingers, the ring tones, the track on a loop or  the shouting despite close proximity, banish the demons that arrive only with silence?

And if these are the good times, then when will the silence return?

Or is silence and development always mutually exclusive?