It’s celebrated in emojis, party bags and board games, piled on cup cakes and meringues – and there’s even a museum dedicated to it. How did we get here?

‘I was a little hesitant about setting up the National Poo Museum,” begins Daniel Roberts, co-creator of the Isle of Wight’s most intriguing new tourist destination. “I thought, am I going to be socially contaminated? Are people going to point at me? Am I going to become Mr Poo?”

He needn’t have worried. The museum’s exhibits – encased in balls of resin, like something from a slightly troubling reimagining of Jurassic Park – were a hit. During the year in which the attraction was housed at the Isle of Wight Zoo, the zoo reported its busiest-ever summer. “People just loved it,” Roberts says. “We were nobodies, but because we mentioned poo, the whole world came running.” The museum’s arrival couldn’t have been better timed because, as Roberts puts it: “In the two years since we launched, we’ve seen an explosion in poo.”