Drabble would like to dabble in the field of invention

Wyn Drabble would like to invent a device to remove seeds from watermelons. Photo / Any Lane

OPINION

I don’t think you would look at me and pick me as an inventor. That said, there are a few things that get my dander up so I feel it might be time to dabble in the field of invention. A dander height-measurer is one possibility.

My first idea is for a watermelon seed-remover. Nothing spoils the refreshing potential of a wedge of cool watermelon like the presence of hard black seeds. I have one colleague who loves the taste but will not eat it purely because of this issue. So there is at least one potential purchaser for my creation.

Using the end of a knife, you can try as hard as you like to remove the nuisances from their soft pink bed of flesh and you can even think you’ve found and expelled them all. But when you bite into it your teeth meet the small intruders you missed.

There are those who don’t mind this because they enjoy spitting. I don’t.

I’m not actually up to the drawing board stage yet but my first thought is based on the domestic vacuum cleaner. It would need a sucky motor but not a motor so sucky that it sucks up the flesh as well. It would need to burrow, seek and suck selectively.

The resulting piece of watermelon would take on the appearance of pink honeycomb, or a collection of unused mineshafts through candy-pink terrain.

I would also like to attend to the matter of faulty toilet rolls. Most seem to be 2-ply which is necessary to improve absorbency and strength allowing better performance. Unfortunately, one layer sometimes sticks to the next layer in certain places. This means it pulls a long pointed shard of the next layer with it and can keep at it for several revolutions of the roll.

I’ll call it toilet roll sharding – for want of a better name. No matter what I call it, it is an irritating pain in the butt.

Wyn Drabble

Let’s look at some other interesting inventions from around the world. If a) your lips are dry and chapped and b) you like the taste and smell of bacon, someone has invented a product just for you. It’s bacon-flavoured lip balm.

Someone called Dominic Wilcox invented an item for the phone-using multi-tasker. When you are using your right thumb on your phone screen and your left hand is doing something else (say, fondling the dog) a third hand would certainly speed up the operation of the phone. Enter the Nose Stylus, a long, pointed nose or beak, held in place by elastic around the back of the head.

I suppose a proboscis might be a better name for it.

I assure you I am making up neither the balm nor the beak.

Then there’s the revolving icecream cone holder. If you’ve experienced the inconvenience of having to turn your icecream around manually all the time to lick all sides, you will really appreciate this battery-operated rotator. I think.

You might not even believe that there is a smart umbrella which lets you know when it’s raining. Clever!

Finally, one for those who are really good at making sandwiches for lunch but their colleagues keep stealing them from the workplace fridge. It’s a standard clear plastic sandwich bag except it has realistic mouldy patches painted on the outside.

Having read about those, I’m sure you’ll agree that my ideas are not too silly after all. In fact my mind is already leaping ahead to an invention based on the Swiss army knife. You probably guessed it – a handy watermelon seed remover and anti-sharding toilet roll fixture in the one stylish item.

I’m surely onto a winner here.