I’m on a short business trip to Germany with a bunch of strangers, and we’re between flights, sitting in an executive lounge in Munich airport, courtesy of our hosts.

I have never been in executive airport lounge before because I know them to be an extortionately expensive way of entitling gullible travellers to free tea and coffee and, maybe, biscuits.

But now that I’m in here, I feel the scales falling from my eyes. Wide leather sofas, designer coffee tables and every continental pastry known to man. Exotic fresh fruits. Free spirits and wine on tap.

If the departure lounge at half term, waiting for the boarding call for a Ryanair flight, is my idea of hell, this is heaven.

I grab a free Independent and some soup while our host gets us all wheat beers, and glance at the headlines of what now seems a world away – politicians arguing about university fees and the fairest way to count the electorate’s votes – and settle back to listen to a story that the anglicised American lady among us is telling.

It starts off about the superiority of our NHS over the American health system, and soon she’s illustrating it with the example of her mother being bitten by a rattlesnake and being told when she gets to hospital, sorry, but your health insurance just doesn’t cover this.

Even though we all only met ten minutes ago, you’d think we were intimate acquaintances when she utters that last sentence.

We all lean forward towards her, eyebrows up to our hairlines, firing questions. Like, is it legal for doctors to turn a life-or-death emergency away? Or how much do you have to pay to get full cover, then? But of course what we all really mean is, oh my god! And did your mother die?

Out of the corner of my eye, I notice another woman approaching our sofas. She’s carrying a paperback book and has raised her reading glasses up onto her head. When she starts to speak to our American colleague, it’s clear that she’s from across the pond too.

“Pardon me?” she says. There appears to be a question mark hanging in there somewhere.

“You are talking incredibly loudly? I and the entire lounge can hear everything you say? It’s just not that interesting? I’m trying to read and I can’t because you’re so loud?”

I glance round furtively, embarrassed on behalf of our new colleague, but in a very English way, also embarrassed for everyone. Sure enough, there are now several craned necks around the room. People are very aware of the current US standoff.

Our colleague is magnificently magnanimous. She apologises and says she’ll keep her voice down from now on. Yes, really. How thoughtless of her. The woman with the book still stands there, fired up with adrenaline that is now useless. She opens her mouth and closes it again. Then she turns round and goes back to where she was sitting, several sofas away.

Our American makes a bit of a can-you-believe-that face, and then starts talking again, so quietly that it’s technically a whisper.

I didn’t think you were loud, I say, equally quietly. But the Australian bloke with us is less naïve. Swigging his beer, he tells us that the woman didn’t like hearing the land of the free being slagged off in front of foreigners, even if it was by one of her own.

We glance over at the reading woman. Her face is flushed and she looks miserable and cross. She hasn’t reopened her book.

So, what did your, er, mother do …. ? begins someone, after a decent pause.

As one, about five or six individuals in the lounge stand up, stretch, and move to the sofas next to ours. When our woman whispers a reply, they all lean in like a Mexican wave.