With no intention of sounding paternalistic, having come to this point I feel I must warn you: walking along the street plugged into your ipod can pose a risk to your current life. It happened to me.

No, I´m not talking about a car crossing your way and bang! This warning I´m giving you is of a different sort, it´s intended for educated adults who can be reasonably presumed to possess the capacity to preserve their own existence in the face of the traditional, expected, threats related to life in the city. For, no matter how systematically you may look this way and that before you cross the road (and I´m sure you do, don´t you?), you´re not safe from a podcast that might change your life.

These things happen when you least expect it. It was not a viral podcast, of the kind that comes speeding through the internet. It was an apparently harmless podcast, which no one had warned be about. Nor did I imagine that something like this could happen to me so quickly, in so few words...

"Our children - I should explain - go to a wonderful but slightly pixilated progressive school in New York, whose core pieties rest both on the necessities of ethnic and sexual diversity in all things and on the practices of the Elizabethan theatre. The kids are taught that all prejudice of any kind is always wrong… but that bed tricks and iambic pentameter are inherently virtuous".

It left me thinking. School. Pieties. Prejudice. Diversity. Theatre. Progressive. By the time I got home, my head was buzzing and my heart pounded. I only knew that I knew nothing, and I needed to know. What on earth could a progressive school be?