AR is a planet. It doesn’t really matter where it is. Suffice it to say AR is. Because you see it’s the people of AR that I’m going to tell you about and if that involves the odd bit of description of the place itself, well so be it. AR men, as they say.

There’s one major characteristic common to all people of AR. It’s major because it’s something that you don’t find anywhere else, among any community anywhere in this world and possibly this universe. But then, AR is not of this universe, as you will soon see.

On AR all the people are female. Yes, you’ve got it – no males of any sort exist there, not a milligram of testosterone is to be found there, neither a scrotum, nor a testicle; not even a rudimentary penis or a sniff of a prostate. No voices break or wet dreams spurt forth in the night, there are no foreskins to circumcise and no vasectomies to perform. More to the point, there are no dirty socks to pick up, no mysteriously lost items that only someone with a womb can find, and best of all…no dribbles on the toilet seat!

So, I hear you ask, who are these amazing creatures? Can they really be women as we know them? How do they reproduce themselves? Who mends their computers and television sets? Who plumbs in their washing machines and tinkers with their cars? Who, for goodness sake, puts up the odd shelf and Artexes their ceilings? And more to the bloody point, who brings home their bacon and fights their wars for them?

Ah AR!

Believe it or not, they do-it-all themselves!

Now, before you start to wonder if this is going to turn out to be one of those annoying TV adverts and brace yourself for the sickeningly familiar sound of some idiot pretending to be a shop assistant telling you that you can do it if you B and Q it, read on. You might learn something to your advantage and it definitely won’t be that there’s 50% off rawl plugs all this week when you buy six tins of Dulux.

I’ll be honest. I was lying before when I said it didn’t matter where this amazing place was. It does. That’s because it exists in a parallel universe to ours, a universe where something odd happened to the human genome.