Come on, admit it. You love it. Listening to other people’s conversations when you’re pretending to read a book/listen to your ipod/look out the window/eat your lunch/fall down the stairs. Especially if said conversations are salacious or shocking or just downright weird.

The only downside to this most fascinating of pursuits is the slight guilty blush you develop as you realise you’ve been holding your book upside down. You’re an amateur. You need help.

Now you’ve been challenged to go pro. Bugged is an eavesdropper’s dream. You listen in wherever you are on July 1st 2010, then you write something in response to what you’ve heard. Not only is no-one going to judge you for your listening in, you’re actually being told to do it.  All the cool kids are doing it. Its allowed.

If you’re worried that permission to recklessly invade personal space will take all the fun out of it, fear not. Check out Bugged’s website for some classic chunks of conversation overheard so far, in the run up to what they’re calling B.O.D (Big Overhearing Day). 

The icing on this particular nosey cake is that whatever you write has the chance to appear on their website, or even in the Bugged anthology, released in the autumn and launched at the Birmingham Book Festival.

So…. get yourself a pen and paper, or one of those newfangled typing devices that sit on your knees. Go somewhere that you are likely to encounter other people on Thursday, 1 July (the Book Festival team will be eavesdropping around the Custard Factory), and let your peeled ears do the rest.

Note: Book. Right way up. Otherwise gives the game away.