It’s Valentine’s Day. Right, that’s got that out of the way.
As a would-be inventor, who’s failed to actually invent anything, it never ceases to amaze me how often clever people come up with clever ideas to resolve problems that you didn’t know existed in the first place. It’s an old golfing joke that frequently the last thing you do before going out to tee-off is nip to the gents, where you are greeted with the slogan Armitage Shanks. As a golfing disaster that all hope to avoid (shanking), you fondly hope that Armitage will keep the affliction to himself. It’s one of those words that golfers avoid like the plague, in the way that actors will never mention Macbeth, when they are performing it. All of that is a rather convoluted way of congratulating Armitage (I presume) on a very simple solution to the problem of splash back. (Which I did know was a problem!). Since I was a wee lad (excuse the pun), urinals, despite coming in many shapes and sizes, have universally presented the challenge of keeping one’s wee safely contained within the porcelain and not spattering the cords. In between purchasing wood clamps to repair an old family heirloom and meeting Mrs T’s demands for more cream, I took advantage of the public facilities in the shiny new Beacon Centre where the incredibly simple addition of a centre vertical ridge deflects the descending liquid to the side and not straight back at you. How on earth did it take so long to come up with that!
I remember another brilliantly simple idea from my youth, when we would often stand around at buffet style parties with plate in one hand, fork in the other and a glass of wine perched precariously somewhere in between. A plastic clip-on glass holder attached to the plate resolved the problem. Presumably somebody made a killing….long before the days of Dragons’ Den. Talking of which, Mrs T has just purchased some plastic bottle holders that she’d seen in The Den. They have brackets that you glue onto bathroom tiles and then attach the racks that tidy up all those bottles of soap, shampoo and super-natural coconut conditioner that litter the bath; very simple but remarkably effective. It’s taken until 2020 to devise and so much better than those irritating bits of metal that hang off the shower and inevitably end up being thrown away as more annoying than useful.
Now that I have more time to myself, it surely is only a matter of time before my first successful invention catches the eye of a Dragon and produces that passive income after which all entrepreneurs yearn……
Meanwhile, I look forward to a weekend of hockey umpiring in howling gales and torrential rain as Dennis the Menace wreaks its transatlantic vengeance for the second week running. Why on earth did I volunteer…..?
ADayInTheStrifeOf 