This week, we met a young man in Riyadh who summed up the changes going on across Saudi Arabia right now. “People are testing to find out where the limit is every day” he told us, “but they haven’t found it yet”.

In my brief time here, I can offer only a few anecdotes.

I stepped into a hotel lift on my first morning here to be greeted by two Saudi women wearing no headscarfs and unaccompanied by a male. Even that 30 second journey to the 7th floor with them would have been unthinkable not that long ago.

On a visit to a Saudi business one afternoon, we spoke with a lady about her love of cars – a ‘female petrol head’ if you like. She is spending her spare time in the showrooms, picking out the dream drive. By June, it will be legal for her to take to the road on her own.

And on Wednesday night, in the heart of Riyadh’s King Abdullah Financial District, the media were treated to a feast of previously banned entertainment. Live jazz boomed out into the night sky, actors dressed in costumes or painted silver danced around their guests. Amongst the audience gathered for the launch of Saudi Arabia’s first pubilc cinema in 35 years was the Minister of Culture and Information, part of who’s job it was to prevent such things. Now, at the insistence of the young Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman, the establishment is changing its tune.

People here say they feel as though a weight has been lifted, and that the collective mood is lighter.

There is a very real limit of course. Ask those members of the Saudi elite who were locked up in the Ritz Carlton Hotel late last year as part of an anti-corruption drive. Some may face trial, others instead handed assets to the state and now keep quiet. Then there’s the executions: now behind closed doors instead of public, but still near the top of the global rankings, according to the campaign group Reprieve. Saudi jails are still packed with human rights activists, journalists, and political dissidents.

Changing that does not appear to be on the reform programme. But still, there is an optimism amongst young Saudis we’ve met – albeit in only major cities, and with officialdom watching closely – that momentum for change is building from the top down.