An autistic woman who struggles to start conversations has discovered a talent for bringing them to an abrupt and uncomfortable end, sources have said.

Paige Thomas, 44, never knows what to say when speaking to friends and family, but, once she finally works up the courage to join a conversation, everyone becomes oddly silent until someone desperately steps in to change the subject.

Thomas said: “The other day at lunch, someone asked me where I was from. I began to tell them about how my area has become an experiment in gentrification, a playground for yummy mummies and career ceramicists who don’t give a single earthenware fuck about ordinary people being priced out of town, because they exist in a sourdough-cold-brew-Mini-Boden bubble where life is jolly lovely and everyone pronounces ‘chorizo’ correctly and selling plaster casts of your left nut somehow lets you afford a mortgage on a three-bed.”

“The office went silent,” Thomas continued. “One guy just said, ‘Oh’, and closed the tab where he’d been browsing Rightmove.”

Wallace Murray, 50, Thomas’ colleague, said: “I’ve never learned so much against my will.”

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