Cradle your balls in your hand, and be amazed. Each second 1000 hopeful sperm are being produced. Each one can live up to a month waiting for the great fertilisation race, and if deposited in a female, it can live for another three days.

Only 3% of your semen consists of sperm. The balance is made up of all sorts of bits and pieces including protein, citric acid, fructose, sodium chloride and ammonia.

Dip your finger into it and taste. If it is bitter you could be a marijuana smoker, or a coffee drinker. A sharp taste and you could be a red meat or chocolate eater. Vegetarians have a mild tasting semen, while if it is sweet you could be a borderline diabetic. Quite what the semen belonging to a diabetic vegetarian with a fondness for a joint would taste like, I'm not sure. Any connoisseurs out there?
Containing 36 calories, the nutritional value of that spoonful of semen equals a steak, three eggs, two oranges, and a lemon. Sounds like quite a healthy meal. Go to The Factory for dinner, and at the same time you can tell by the taste, what your chef had for dinner.

But then again, if your donor is HIV positive, it could be dangerous, but only if you have sores in your mouth, just brushed your teeth or had your tongue pierced. Studies of gay couples in San Francisco where one partner is HIV positive, the negative partner retained his negative status despite regular consumption of his positive partner's semen. But then it is probably not a good idea to make a habit of such a diet, just in case.

If you don't want to swallow, then you can do as Helen Gurley Brown, the '60s feminist, advised, and spread semen on your face. "Full of protein, it makes a fine face mask".

If, whilst cradling your balls, they seem to be particularly ample, look at your ring finger. Is it longer than the index finger? Be amazed. Researchers have discovered that the same genes that tell the testes to grow in utero also stimulate the growth of the ring finger. Men with a long ring finger tend to have bigger balls, a higher level of testosterone, produce more sperm and have a higher sex drive.

If you had been alive in the times of the Ancient Greeks, and looked at your puddle of semen, it would have had a very different meaning. For the Greeks believed that semen contained all the manly virtues of courage, strength, fairness and honesty. It was the duty of a mentor to bugger his adolescent student so as to pass on these virtues to the next generation. A very different attitude from the Middle Ages, a culture where the Virgin symbolised all that was pure and the penis stood for all that was evil. It was taught that original sin was passed from one generation to the next in the vilest of all bodily emissions, semen.

In 1677, Antony van Leeuwenhoek, using one of the world's first microscopes, discovered the existence of bacteria, as well as spermatozoa. He announced that each sperm was full of veins and nerves, and in fact contained a miniature person just waiting to be deposited in a female. The sole function of the woman was to receive and nourish the pre-formed person in her womb. Scientific drawings of sperm at that time show a tiny naked man sitting inside what looks like a hot air balloon with a tail.

Looking at your spoonful of semen back then must have been a little unnerving if you believed it was full of hopeful little people waiting for a womb. Maybe it is not surprising masturbation was frowned on and fellatio w as considered to be an act of cannibalism. After all, as the Monty Python song reminded us, "Every sperm is sacred, every sperm is good, every sperm is needed in your neighbourhood".

Attackers sliced off Rasputin's penis flinging it across the room and what was left of Rasputin into the Neva River, where he drowned. The severed penis was recovered and kept by one of his former lovers in a polished wooden box by her bedside. Maria Rasputin, writing her father's biography, described it as looking like a 'blackened, overripe banana, about a foot long'.

Then there are men that decide to purposely remove their own penises. It can be seen as the final frontier of body modification, the ultimate level of sexual gratification, a one-off sexual high. More usually it is part of a sex change operation. In 1952 a Danish surgeon amputated the penis of an American ex-GI named George Jorgensen, thus completing one of the first 'successful' sex changes. A few weeks later a stunned world was introduced to Christine Jorgensen, a woman who now believed that, although she didn't have a vagina, she had the body she was meant to have. Successful sex change operations are no longer uncommon; giving men trapped in the wrong body a new lease of life as a woman, and unlike Miss Jorgensen, they can be given vaginas.

What do you do if you find yourself in a freakish accident and your dick is no longer attached? Don't panic, just hurry. Pop it into a bag to prevent freezer burn and then into a fridge and find a micro-surgeon to reattach it as soon as possible. The time lapse between injury and re-attachment needs to be less than six hours if your dick is to perform all required functions once more.

If you run out of time, you can always do as the aboriginal women of Grippsland, Australia apparently do. They wear their dead husband's penises around their necks as a talisman. An interesting pendant, but possibly a little off-putting for any subsequent suitors.