My gym has an enormous super-steamy steam room. You can never see the edges and you can never truly tell if you’re in it alone or there are twenty others in there with you. And it’s the best place to listen to a wide cross-section of people’s conversations. Which – if you’re holed up in your local coffee shop – you probably aren’t.

Super-steamy steam rooms are great because the people in them totally forget – or simply don’t know – someone else is right in there with them. So they’re more natural.

So I get to hear a group of 20-something lads who work in a local hotel talking about how to “ask out the girl in laundry”.  Or the late-thirties post-stag weekenders who are ready to “drop all that going-on-a-bender shit” but don’t know how to tell their mates.  Or the women talking about “those scary Brexit signs on the M4 and the ads on the radio”. It’s a chance to dip into so many people’s lives and listen to how they talk, what they talk about … and I suppose it’s a bit creepy too.

Thanks super-steamy steam room.