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That scene at the end of 2001 where Dave’s entered the monolith and he ages in stages, in an elegant white room - remember how the pod sits in the corner, fitting in with the colour palette but otherwise looking a bit out of place? Well here it is again, look. If Luigi Colani and Franco Sbarro designed a washing machine, it would look like this MRI scanner, a gigantic half-sucked polo mint sticking its tongue out at one end of an empty room. If you can’t picture it now…anyway, it looks expensive. Lying on my back on its protruding tongue, I quiz the technician. “How much does one of these cost?”

“About half a million, why?”

“‘Cause I’ve just sneezed all over it.”