Imagine going to see a public performance and then finding that a) you're the only person in the audience and b) the performance involves a complete stranger bathing you.
It all started innocently enough, as part of the eight months I've spent in BBC News in Scotland, firstly writing for the website then working on radio programmes. I'm on the Journalism Trainee Scheme - a year-long BBC training programme that takes on 15 promising journalists and places them all over the UK to learn about online, radio and TV.
My radio placement was coming to an end and about a month before it finished I was worried I hadn't done enough reporting. So I met up with my Glasgow mentor and explained the problem.
"Well, what do you like? What are you interested in?" he asked.
My mind fuzzed. It was like being put on stage and told to say something funny. I'm a 'hard news' person but before starting at the BBC I'd worked in bookshops and publishing.
"The arts?"
"Right," he said, "it's the Edinburgh festival for the next month. Go over there and do some reporting."
I lived off supermarket falafels for a month in Edinburgh. Instead of setting up guests then writing briefs and cues for others, I was out doing everything myself: interviewing acrobatic cross-dressing Australians and Indian fusion jazz musicians, then cutting together radio.
One day we received a media invite for Adrian Howells' The Pleasure of Being: Washing, Feeding, Holding. In Howells' immersive art piece, he would take a lone audience member then bathe them, hug them and feed them. He wouldn't strip the participant naked, but the idea of the show was that you would volunteer to disrobe to whichever level you felt comfortable with, while he remained clothed.
The press flies had been buzzing around it already. I knew it would make good radio. I could hear how I would use the natural sound of water. But I was wondering if I'd be able to go through with it.
I gulped; the back of my throat was cold. From finding football interviewees for the Spain correspondent in Barcelona, to investigating Scottish knife crime statistics, and now this.
I decided I would do it.
The concept is easy to ridicule, and some writers did. But how many of those had actually gone through the experience and given an honest account of it as art? Remarkably few.
It lasted an hour and took place in a dark Edinburgh hotel.
When I knocked on the hotel room door, a soft-voiced woman answered, with a wave of heat coming from the room behind. Any natural light from the afternoon sun had been blocked out and replaced by fields of tea lights.
She told me Adrian wasn't quite ready yet. I waited in the corridor with the hum of an air conditioner. I grabbed my Nagra and whispered out an introduction for the radio piece on the spot.
The door clicked open again and I stepped into the glowing room.
Adrian was waiting in the bathroom and I was guided round to a changing area. The lady left me, locking the door as she went.
Sneaking into the robe, I went and knocked on the bathroom door and Adrian helped me into a bath filled with rose petals, before hugging me on the floor for 15 minutes then feeding me a tab of white chocolate.
It's known as one-on-one theatre and Adrian Howells is a master. I recorded the whole thing with a Nagra. Some of it did sound truly weird out of context - it's hard trying to explain it. It wasn't perverse, although you might not believe me.
Howells' point was that we're rarely wholeheartedly embraced in our lifetimes. Most of us are cradled just twice: at the beginning and end of life. In the crib and on the death bed. I'm not sure if bathing strangers is a cure for civilisation's failings, but it was his attempt to encourage more nurturing in society, perhaps.
The package I made was broadcast on BBC Scotland's flagship radio programme. I glowed with pride, but it felt like I'd done more than make a package. By putting aside my personal feelings of gnawing near-terror and treating that interview as part of any other day at work, I'd made radio that wasn't being done anywhere else.
Unfortunately it also means that whenever I explain it to people I'm greeted with a facial expression that either suggests concern for my mental well-being or hardly suppressed laughter.
Originally from Barrow-in-Furness, Hannah Livingston studied English literature at the University of East Anglia before editing the student newspaper. After working for the university's press office, she moved to Edinburgh before joining BBC Scotland in Glasgow.
The 15 members of the BBC Journalism Trainee Scheme started their year of broadcast training in March. They are offered work in different departments along with career advice, CV clinics and interview practice, to help them to find future jobs in the BBC; although there are no guarantees. The scheme has been running since 2007 and the recruitment process for the next intake will start at the end of September. To apply and for more details.
