At some point it's going to happen: I'll come up with an original metaphor, an image that's pulled fresh from the earth with the soil still stuck to it's sides. It'll happen, I know it will, that baseball field will be built; but between now and whenever, it's going have to be an old image, dents in the panels beaten out, tyres retrod, to carry the essence of what I want to convey.

I don't know how, or indeed why, icons appear, just that they do, and that occasionally some transcend cultures, and in fact, become so embedded in daily global life, you can say they're part of the cultural DNA. No can, in some cases, the working verb is are. Take the Beatles as the uber-example.

There's no country I've been to ( and that's coming up to nearly sixty), where I've not heard a Beatles number in one form or another: someone lazily strumming Fab Four tunes on a levee in pre-Katrina New Orleans; an elderly trio crooning Beatle hits in a hotel lobby in Chennai; sat next to a very young man on a Tokyo subway train who was flipping between an English language biography on John Lennon and it's Japanese language equivalent. They're part of the fabric.

Of course they're not on their own here, I think they're the most powerful global icon, but there are others in the iconosphere - Elvis for instance, can't forget him, pretty powerful presence, and there are sports icons, especially football (Soccer if you're American and reading this), and this inevitably means one particular powerhouse brand - Manchester United. Just knowing a few of their players is akin to having the ability to speak a global lingua franca.

They're everywhere. I've seen people wearing MUFC shirts mooching through Hollywood; plenty of places in Europe, with the most unlikely sighting being in the DMZ. The most heavily defended border in the World, nearly half a million men on each side of the wire facing off, the last thing I expect to see in an exhibition room on a series of North Korean infiltration tunnels in a small complex, bang up to the DMZ and surrounded by a minefield, is a signed MUFC shirt taking pride of place. Not long before Manchester United become part of the global cultural genome if this kind of thing keeps up.