At 4.13pm yesterday, at an IP address in central London, I typed the words “Lionesses”, “Coming” and “Home” on my computer. Then, to use a verb that did not exist 25 years ago, I “googled” them. Yesterday, almost certainly, you too will have googled something. Possibly, you even typed the same words. Eighty-five per cent of searches are not original; mine certainly wasn’t. Probably you didn’t think about what happened next, in the milliseconds that followed. Probably, you didn’t think about this quotidian miracle that has changed the world.
Those words, converted to 1s and 0s, whizzed out of London, past the M25 and under the sea. When they emerged from the subterranean mass of cables of information fizzing in all directions, they found themselves
