When I was nine, I thought I was an expert at sex. Thanks to the well-thumbed pages of our Dorling Kindersley encyclopaedias, I had just discovered the secret of life: the recipe for a new human being. Men produced sperm, women produced eggs and when these two ingredients came together, a shiny new being would result. Bingo!
Unfortunately, my encyclopaedia didn’t explain how this lucky sperm and egg came to meet each other, and so I developed my own theory. When a married couple were fast asleep in bed, a sperm from the man would swim across the treacherous terrain of the bed before finding its way up the woman’s vagina to embrace the egg. A quest of Odyssean proportions.