Mrs Chewing Pixels’ hair conditioner looks exactly like semen (um, not that I know what semen looks like or anything, mum).

I think we were around fifteen when my school’s English department booked an avant garde production of MacBeth to perform in front of the students. It was a small troupe, four or five in number.

They were a mix of twenty-something men and women, young enough to still hold out hope for a career in the performing arts, old enough to deeply resent the spotty, ignorant faces in front of them, each one a reminder of just how far they still had to go to realise that hope.

The production was contemporary set, so during the scene in which the three witches stir a cauldron while chanting “Round about the cauldron go; In the poison’d entrails throw etc”, the actresses threw various everday objects into their cooking pot.

One of these items was a condom, filled with a whitish liquid and tied off to prevent leakage. In it went, with a squelchy thud, our mouths dropping as it did so (the witches were being played by women in their early twenties, after all).

After the play ended our teacher invited questions from the students. One brave kid piped up: “How did you make the semen?”, a smart, ostensibly innocent way to answer the question everyone was pondering in their heads: was it real or not.

Without missing a beat one of the witches raced into a through a list of ingredients: “Water, sugar, eggs, milk…”

We marveled at the thought and effort that had gone into the prop and, truth be told, I doubt anyone really remembered much else about the afternoon.

At the time I thought nothing of it, but now I wonder now whether she made it all up, gifting us a neat story to pass on, one far more interesting than the reality, that the condom was filled with £1.99 hair conditioner bought from Boots.