Bother of invention

Okay, so a few posts ago I raged against the irrelevancy of bookmarks, citing them as something that would have been thrown out of Dragons Den had such a concept ever been rbought to them. Which perhaps was affording them a little too much gravitas as a business idea, but they’re still rubbish.

Anyhow, in response to this post, and in the spirit of not just criticising the world at large the whole time, I’m going to offer up an idea of my own, which is this: flexi-daylight-savings-time.

Michael McIntyre does a nice wee spot on the in one of his routines, poking fun at that fact that most of us are never aware that the clocks are going backwards of forwards until we’re out in the evening and someone says ‘don’t forget, the clocks go forward tonight’. How this original person knows is anybody’s guess. Presumably Metro or something. Even then, it still takes us a moment to work out if tonight’s change is ‘the good one’ (one more hour in bed or one less?).

So if it’s certainly not something that most of us currently plan in advance, or particularly make use of, why not let people choose when they’re going to implement the change? Let everyone have an extra hour in bed that they can cash in once a year, and likewise an hour that they can snip out of the night at the time that it most benefits.

Admittedly, the latter may not immediately seem as desirable as a lie in on a Monday morning, but you just wait until you’re got toothache one evening and have to wait ’til morning for the dentists to open. Or maybe you’ve got a red-eye flight and are just having to sit up, bored, waiting for your two am taxi.

Anyhow, the point is, it’d be ace. Now, I have no idea how this concept could actually be realised. In fact I recognise that it’d take some serious tinkering with the fabric of physics in order to afford everyone individual exemptions from the passage of time once a year. But we could at least get someone looking into it.

Have those Sky+ engineers cast an eye over it and let me know how it goes, and in the meantime, I’m going to go and spend my bonus hour in the tub.

Low marks

I keep coming across repeats of old episodes of Dragons Den on Dave at the moment, with previous pitchers putting their grand ideas forward to a panel of entrepreneurs in the hope of securing investment and a spot of business acumen.

A lot of the ideas get rightly derided as rubbish and the poor soul responsible is packed off on their way. Often they don’t work, or the pitcher’s grasp of finances isn’t as sound as the investors would like. But sometimes they get dismissed on the basis that they have created a product for which there is no demand. As inventors, they’ve solved a problem that doesn’t exist.

It’s a justifiable criticism, but there’s still a hell of a lot of products around us that fill no real need whatsoever.

I’m not having a go at purely material possessions here, or souvenirs, or random tat and window dressing. I mean stuff like bookmarks. Without bookmarks, how would your life go on? Well, you’d do what most people do, which is just stick an old train ticket between the pages of whatever you’re reading. Or a photograph. Or any bit of card or paper that comes to hand.

It’s actually quite nice, being able to attribute purpose to these tiny scraps that otherwise bear no continued value other than sentiment. It’s nice being able to hold onto these gig tickets and boarding passes and festival flyers and restaurant receipts, and often they’re not so valuable that you’d keep them otherwise.

They’re not your sole reminder of an event or experience, and without them you’d still have the memory. But it will randomly prompt me to recall a happy past occurence when I chance to glance at it again. It’s like scattering the stimuli for happy thoughts around your house as you’d do with framed photographs. But it’s often more personal than that; a crinkled little trinket that means sod all to all but the holder.

There’s probably some fortune cookie motto in the making here, about not judging a book by it’s cover, but being able to judge the reader by what they’ve separated the pages with. But I’m scared of phrasing it properly, as it sounds like exactly the kind of nonsense that someone would print on a giftshop bookmark and the tout to tourists for two pound twenty.