Just over a year ago, I foolishly locked up my bicycle outside school, but forgot to remove the pannier. When I returned the pannier had (not surprisingly) been stolen. Inside it were about ten of the little red notebooks I take everywhere for jotting down ideas for articles, short stories, TV shows and the like.

When I lost my notebooks, I was similarly devastated. All the ideas I had over the past two years were contained within their pages. I could remember only a few of them. Nevertheless, had the impression that those I could not recall were truly brilliant. Those little books were crammed with hilarious plans for columns, the plots of award-winning novels and scripts for radio comedy shows that were only two-thirds as bad as the ones on now.

That is not all, though. In my reminiscence, my lost notebooks were like those of Leonardo da Vinci, containing sketches for many innovative machines. In one book, there was a design for a device that could turn seawater into apple cider, in another plans for an automatic dog, in a third, sketches for a pair of waterproof shoes with television screens built into the toes. Now all these plans are lost to humanity.