At the theater, watching the audience

I can still remember my first sex education class at school in Britain. My classmates and I were all about 11, and our introduction to "the birds and bees" was initially a video showing a family playing badminton at a nudist resort.

Our teacher followed this by reading a carefully prepared list of dos and don'ts - although, as I went to a Roman Catholic school, the list was almost entirely made up of don'ts.

That lesson was not the first time we'd learned about sex; our parents had been feeding us information over the years. But I recall the giggling that emanated from every corner of the class as we watched that video, prompting the teacher every few minutes to shout, "Oh, just grow up!"