Scooter-Chic At Sommerset House...Aldwych, London.

Let's talk about risk. No. Stop. Don't go there. Not the song by Salt N Pepper. Focus. Stay with me. Okay?

The second most dangerous risk you can ever take is to break into the headquarters of the CIA, steal the codes to the nukes with an aim of selling them to the highest bidder... prefarably one from the middle east or, better yet, eastern europe. (Russia, ahem)

"Surely, that should be number one. No?" You must be wondering."Okay, how about this?" Stepping on an Italian's shoes? No. Stepping on a blackman's brand new white Air Force Nikeys? No. Showing up at a Ku Klux Clan meeting and playing Martin Luther King's 'I Have A Dream' speech? No. Parking a gas guzzling SUV monster in front of Green Peace offices? No. Wrong. All those do not count I'm afraid. The number one spot: spilling a Glaswegean's pint. As I personally witnessed what happens to the perpetrator, and I gotta tell you, it ain't pretty.

So why is it that we human beings are drawn to risk like vegetarians are to pork chops? Simple. We are hard wired to take risk. Can you imagine if the first people on earth weren't risk takers to wonder what lay beyond their caves? "I wonder what's in the next valley?" The risks of going to find out were immense, but obviously they went ahead or we'd all still be living in Ethiopia. More recently, what caused Christopher Columbus to sail across the Atlantic, or Neil Armstrong to fly to the moon? Why do people bungee jump? Well, it's simple: we like risk.

Deep at the root of the human brain is the limbic sysytem, a sort of slug-like sticky thing that controls our instincts. That section manufactures and drops something called dopamine into our heads everytime we do something dangerous. And it's this dopamine that gives us the thrill, the rush which takes us to a state of euphoria. It's when you feel most alive.

It's also what cocaine does to the brain everytime it's inhaled. Certain properties of it fool the brain that it's in danger and causes dopamine to be released. That's why people become so addicted, why it's so moreish. The sense of feeling invincible. It's what you feel when you get on a rollercoaster ride. It's gut-wrenchingly scary, but you wanna go again and again. Dopamine is why.

So then, it's this search for risk that drove me to take this shot IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD as the lights were turning green...!!!

Man, what a rush! Blame it on the dopamine.

So tell me. Amidst all the honking and the kind of language that would be frowned upon in a convent, was it worth the risk though?