This journal started in a sauna.
Not metaphorically. Literally. So here's the whole story, exactly as it happened.
My friend and I go way back, to our early twenties, when we did a Contiki tour through Europe. Twelve countries. Twenty-nine days. Zero dignity.
He wasn't out at the time, so we made a pact: fake couple. Me the decoy, him the closeted heartthrob. Classic. At one point in Monte Carlo, we swapped outfits. He rocked my skirt, I slouched in his jeans like a hungover tourist trying to look edgy. It wasn't subtle. Somehow, we ended up on the cover of the Contiki magazine as "The Contiki Couple." I still don't know if they were in on the joke or just liked the symmetry.
Fast forward a few decades and here we are, still tangled up in each other's lives. Older, wiser, slightly more moisturised. Doing what we now call "sauna dates." No booze, no backpackers, just a hot wooden box and the kind of conversations that leave you lighter than when you walked in.
One session, as sweat trickled down places we won't name, he turned to me and said, "What do you want? Like, really want, for you."
I blinked. Nothing came.
I've always been a creator. Projects, businesses, brands. Building things is what I love to do. But after my last business collapsed with a humiliating thud, I lost my spark. That midnight obsession, the itch that keeps you scribbling in notebooks and Googling patent lawyers? Gone. Evaporated. Like the moisture from my split ends in that bloody sauna (this was before I discovered sauna hats, a revelation I wish had come sooner).
He asked again. I dodged.
The third time, with steam curling around us like a stage cue, he looked at me.
And this time, I said it.
"I want to write a book."
He didn't flinch. Just nodded.
"You should."
That conversation is where Conversations in the Sauna came from — a collection of stories from the heat. The strangers and the regulars. The things people say when the temperature climbs high enough to strip back the performance. The wisdom that arrives, unlikely and unprompted, from people you'll never see again, and sometimes from the one person who's known you for thirty years and still asks the question you've been avoiding.
Full disclosure, the book isn't finished. This journal is where I'm sharing the stories first, as I write them. If they land with you, that might be exactly the push I need to get my act together and actually finish the thing.
This journal is where that world lives now.
What you'll find here
Stories from sauna benches and cold plunge edges. Observations about the strange, levelling effect of extreme heat and cold on ordinary people. The characters who appear, the conversations that shouldn't work but do, the rituals that hold more than they look like they hold.
Some pieces are long. Some are short enough to read before your timer goes off. Some are funny. Some aren't.
All of them are true, or true enough.
What you won't find here
Five benefits of anything. Optimisation protocols. Before-and-after metrics. Instructions for becoming a better, faster, more efficient version of yourself.
The sauna has never been about that. The best saunas in the world — Finnish lakeside, Kiwi backyard, Auckland rooftop, hotel spa at 6am — they're not optimisation spaces. They're permission spaces.
Permission to be quiet. To sweat. To say the thing you've been carrying around. To sit with a stranger in the particular intimacy of shared heat and not need it to be anything more than what it is.
That's what this journal is about.
Welcome. Grab a bench. The stones are hot.