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I found myself thinking this week, how did it all begin?

And the answer may surprise you.

It started 450,000 years ago.

Several ice ages, as it happened, with a great flood that turned Britain into an island.

And one of the examples I talk about in the book in origins is the creation of Britain

as an island and how that has had huge influences throughout our history of giving us this

kind of defensive moat around us that stopped invasion from the Spanish without having an

amade, stopped impolian invading, stopped Hitler in the Second World War.

Clearly this was good for our own sovereignty, but you could also argue that was good for

Europe as a whole.

No one person can build an empire throughout Europe and that has had a huge influence

in fact that we've been in an island because of this mega flood that you mentioned from

a previous ice age, 405 ice ages ago.

That was Professor Lewis Darnall talking to me in one of my more interesting interviews

on the today programme this week, but making me realise that my entire adult life had been

wasted.

Instead of talking about who's up and who's down, about the factions, the politicians and

the ideas, I really should have been worrying about how the tectonic plates were moving.

I did get a whole lot more out of his interview than the one I did with the Brexit Secretary

Stephen Barkley on the morning after that vote the night before.

Well, that's what we're exploring in terms of, as I say, the use of technology, the use

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