Diagnosed at the age of 19 with 'tunnel vision' Roz has developed a keen sense of hearing. This has helped her perfect the art of 'people listening'… that's eavesdropping, to you and me.

Roz

If you walk past Roz in the street, and she's not looking directly at you, then she won't see you. "I've got some vision in the middle, but nothing round the edges," she explained, " It is like looking down a tunnel." But Roz has turned this to her advantage. Her impaired vision has caused her to develop her sense of hearing, "I'm not good at facial recognition, but I use my hearing a lot to identify people. I tune into auditory material, not visual."

Her sharp hearing is rather useful. Roz is particularly good now at being able to eavesdrop, she prefers the term 'people listening' on conversations in cafés, bars and buses. One one particular occasion though, it led to Roz hearing more than she bargained for.

In a remote part of Gloucestershire, sitting in a pub which she'd never visited before, Roz began to pick up on one couple's chat. She couldn't see them, but knew they were to her right in a separate dining area. Snippets of their conversation drifted over to Roz. They were obviously on a date, the woman quizzing the man about past relationships.

"I heard him say, "There was this special woman who lived in a big house near Oxford'," Roz began. "Then he said, 'She had three brilliant children. I got really fond of them. And she was learning T'ai-Chi, which I wanted to learn." Still listening, Roz thought these details sounded familiar. Appearing to answer the question why did it all go wrong, the man then went on to say, "I upset her, and she just didn't want to know."

With an increasing sense of horror, Roz's realised that it was her they were talking about. Then came, in Roz's view, the clincher, "The woman said, 'Well, I still don't understand why you had to sleep with her.' To which he replied, 'Well, she was a very seductive woman!'"

Knowing that this man was the type to see cosmic significance in what others would call coincidence, Roz felt constrained about standing up and saying, "Hi! Fancy meeting you here!" "I thought it kinder not to do it," she said, "It would have completely blown him away."

But what amazed Roz was that this all this happened ten years ago, and this man was still nursing a broken heart! "I was quite shocked that I had dismissed it, and the other person had taken it quite hard."

And they say eavesdroppers hear no good of themselves.