They have tried to fit airbags to motorcycles and even motorcyclists, I understand, but the triggering conditions are extremely hard to get right (so that they don’t fire when travelling over rough ground or when braking hard).

In addition, bikes have the disadvantages that the driver is only centimeters away from any impact and tends to be ejected from the machine, often sideways, during a crash. Airbags might save life if they can be interposed between rider and stationary object, but one of the main causes of injury is abrasion. Airbags will not deal well with high speed tarmac, since it’s difficult to coat them in a thick layer of handstitched goatskin.

Today’s invention attempts to deal with some of these problems. The Hoberman sphere is a brilliant invention with multiple applications. It’s basically a large collection of scissors, joined together so that when they are closed they transform from a small clump to an almost spherical buckminster-like geometry.

I’d suggest that motorcycles could be fitted with several of these, each of which would be made of spring steel and compressed into a small ‘bubble’ enclosure. On impact, with either the road surface or a telegraph pole, the enclosure would shatter, releasing what would almost instantly become a spherical spring, capable of absorbing an enormous amount of energy: a mobile crash barrier.

These devices might even be used on the flanks of a machine in order to stop the bike falling on its side -thus avoiding the usual leg injuries and keeping the rider in the driving seat.

Mathematics textbooks are full of references to fair dice. Fairness they define as yielding equal numbers of each of the 6 possible outcomes, when a die is tossed a very large number of times. A die that came up ‘5’ for the first 30,000 or so tossings, might. however, make one suspicious about exactly how fair it was, even if ‘5’ didn’t reoccur in the next 5,000…it all just shows that humans aren’t naturally attuned to the meaning of probability (anyone’s first 5 minutes in Las Vegas illustrate that).

Today’s invention is a truly fair die.

It consists of a cube with some electronics on board. Each side of the die has a seven-seg display. Whichever of the six sides lands uppermost is the one which displays the result in the usual way (whilst the other five sides show the other five numbers, if necessary).

At each toss, the number to appear on the uppermost face is read from a pregenerated list containing exactly equal numbers of each of the 6 possible outcomes (and distributed along the list using a simple numerical shuffling technique).

If you were concerned that the (predestined) list could be ‘hacked,’ security features, such as holograms, could be embedded in each of the faces. The batteries would require charging occasionally and after say six million throws (that’s 1M 1’s, 1M 2’s, 1M 3’s, etc), the system would shut down permanently.

The good news is that I seem to have overcome my obsession with catflap design. The bad news is that vacuum cleaners have taken their place in my daily ruminations.

In the ideological war between the bagged and the bagless, I’m a conscientious objector. The main reason for not having a bag has to be that it is replaced by a cyclone extractor which maintains suction (or double cyclone, if you want to be patent-picky). The downside here is that a big transparent box is required, in which the stray toenail clippings can gather.

Today’s invention is to make the dual cyclone a bagged vacuum cleaner. Instead of that big, heavy, transparent housing, simply use a circumferential clip which allows a small, clear plastic bag to be attached to hold the crud. This also serves to reuse all those ridiculous supermarket food bags that clog the kitchen, reduces the weight of the machine and still allows observation of the collected dirt (If you insist. Perhaps it’s an alternative entertainment for those people who continue to think TV is a good idea and whose spin dryers are on the blink).

Most importantly, this approach makes getting rid of domestic detritis much easier than fiddling with button-released containers that are always hard to re-seal -by allowing the bag to be slipped off the machine, nipped closed and dumped every time it’s used.

Locusts swarm, apparently, when they become so crowded together that the rate at which they brush each other’s back legs gets beyond a joke. When they then descend on some unsuspecting field in vast numbers, you can say goodbye to whatever crop was trying to grow there.

So the world now has locust control programmes which consist of spraying insecticides or fungal particles on them. This is probably not that good for the environment, even if the volumes of chemicals involved are small.

Today’s invention is to use vacuum cleaners to suck up the offending critters. No point using a bag cleaner of course, so I propose that a large cyclone device be designed, using eg oildrums and fitted at the bottom with a fan powered by a small diesel engine. This would have a large inlet and be cheap enough for every farm to have one fitted to a trailer so as to be manoeuvrable into position beneath a swarm.

The bugs would be sucked into it in large numbers, probably coating the inside gradually with a layer of their carcasses. The majority would be deposited in a hopper (sorry) enabling it to be converted conveniently to animal food or fertiliser. (I had an uncle who ate fried locust paste from a bucket whilst serving in the 8th Army and he said they tasted good -manna from heaven).

Does Dyson have a patent that covers pest control -and cookware, I wonder? ; )

It’s a major challenge sometimes for me not to utter the most extreme expletives. When I’ve tripped over the cat or received yet another insulting TV licence demand, or dropped paint on the carpet, or some IDIOT with a luckybag licence has just cut me up in traffic…etc, etc.

I’m not that keen on my children learning such terms (partly since there is always a danger of getting enigmatic enjoinders from the school banning the words ****, ****, **** and especially **** ).

Today’s invention is therefore a modern version of the old-fashioned swear box.

A microphone feeds into my ever-present laptop, which is running speech-to-text software. Every time it detects a banned word (I have a mercifully limited repertoire of these), it emits a very annoying noise (think Windows at startup) and automatically debits my PayPal account by £1, as a donation to UNICEF.

You could, of course, strip out the motherboard, soundcard, network card and microphone from a pc , stick them in a small box and sell it as a blasphemy sentry.