When I was about 15, thinking I was engaging in a light conversation, I asked a woman when she was due. Of course, she wasn't pregnant. I learned the lesson never to ask again. As a leading man you don't ask a woman's age, and you don't care about her natural hair colour or her weight.

Pick your myth - we're either Pandora or Prometheus or, frankly, maybe Icarus. We are in a tipping-point era, and we have to either catch up to our abilities, culturally, or some massive global catastrophe will befall us. The planet will live on, but we're going to make it more difficult for us to survive.