Low marks
January 31, 2009
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.
