Hot off the bench! A series of accidental meetings in my local sauna, sharing the heat with people in ways that were often surprisingly intimate.

We’re in the tiny, box-like sauna belonging to our local leisure complex, accessible only to those who rent or own property nearby. The leisure complex has a strange sense of half-community… We are all going about our own lives but we are doing so alongside each other.

As a speaker of several Asian languages, a historian, and a curator with a global career spanning roles at world-renowned institutions such as the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Smithsonian, Thomas Wide is certainly not indifferent to difference.

Wide travelled to Washington D.C. every few months to bring Afghan art to the American capital… “I saw, multiple times, people having really surprising experiences… I felt like we had the chance to change people’s minds.”

I speak with the viral indie pop artist about his new and addictive “unlikely mash-ups”, celebrating an era of Facebook swag, and the simultaneous appeal and loneliness of cities like London and New York.

“I’m hoping that rather than trying to slot into an existing genre or type of music, the fans I accumulate are exclusively people who are interested in the experiment.”

My friend Victoria Reeser shares lessons she has learnt through her personal search for purpose, a journey that has taken her from home-schooling in Philadelphia to graduate school in the UK and discovering a passion for painting.

What am I doing? What should I do in the interim period between being where I am (point A) and where I might want to be (point B)? And what if I don’t know exactly what point B consists of, or whether, how, and when it might be achieved?