"Things can only get better", D:Ream promised, but they were wrong, and so were most people in history who have tried to predict the future. It never stopped us from trying, though, and a few visionaries have been pretty good at it. There was Leonardo da Vinci, of course, with his helicopters and fridges, and Joseph Glanvill, who in 1661 suggested moon voyages and communication using "magnetic waves" might be a thing. Civil engineer John Elfreth Watkins, writing in 1900, predicted mobile phones, ready meals and global digital media ("Photographs will be telegraphed from any distance. If there be a battle in China a hundred years hence, snapshots of its most striking events will be published in the newspapers an hour later").

A prime candidate for secular canonisation – and a personal hero of mine – is Frances Gabe. She was a visionary, a terrible neighbour (she antagonised hers with a succession of snarling great danes and a penchant for nude DIY) and the inventor of the self-cleaning home. Gabe, who died in 2016 at 101, transformed her Oregon bungalow into a "giant dishwasher", with a system of sprinklers, air dryers and drains, plus self-cleaning sinks, bath and toilet. "Housework is a thankless, unending job," Gabe said. I agree with Gabe – and with Lenin, who condemned housework as "barbarously unproductive, petty, nerve-racking, stultifying and crushing drudgery".