Necessity

Today

Necessity, they say is the mother of invention. That depends on what you regard as necessary, of course.

I was trying to finish the dungarees I'm stitching for my little great-nephew who's two in a couple of weeks. Just doing the front waistband and realised, after a tricky bit of manoeuvring, that the bobbin had run out and I'd been working away achieving absolutely nothing.

"Humph!" I grumbled "you'd think by this time they'd have invented a method of warning you that it's about to run out...."

In My Day

Daddy was constantly having ideas for inventions. It seemed that he dreamt them and he'd then excitedly tell us of his latest plan. Mostly that's as far as they got, if you don't count his invention for helping him to breathe at night with a cold, which consisted of two little tubes of cardboard stuck into each nostril....  Even so, it was probably a patentable idea.

Often he'd awake after such a dream only to find those brilliant thoughts just slipping away from him. So he kept a little notebook beside the bed so that he could jot down the details of what was to bring him lasting fame and fortune before he forgot. All of his jottings, without exception, when read over a morning cuppa were complete gibberish, like automatic writing in an unknown tongue.

Hearing us describe the throwing of streamers at the last night of the Proms, he dreamt about making a streamer gun. Now there was an idea. Only he never developed it and so we are not now the heirs to the party popper king fortune, somebody else is!

Interesting to think that there was clearly more necessity giving birth to that invention than to the idea of a bobbin warning system.