Words by our beloved back-page columnist Lucinda Stump
IF inventiveness is about creating something that has never existed, I am not the inventive kind. If I was, surely by now I would have invented a way to mulch the garden without having to lug around bales of hay, or a way to traverse our 20 kilometre dirt road in a side-by-side on a rainy day without arriving looking like the loser in a mud-wrestling competition.
And I wouldn’t have said I was creative either, creativity being defined as bringing something new into existence by combining existing elements in a new and original way. But maybe I’m wrong because, this very morning, as I was sifting through a stack of detritus in the office, I came across a Wee Waa News clipping headed “Gold Medal Idea”. It was about a play I had written in 2016 for the
Burren Junction Public School children entitled “Genghis Khan’t and the Amazing Olympic Adventure”. It was the first in a bout of playwriting I indulged in when I was teaching at the school and when we were trying to save the School of Arts Hall from demolition. Every child had a part, the little kinder kids dressed as police officers and arriving on scooters to arrest the villainous Genghis Khan’t.
I had almost forgotten about that particular play, usurped as it had been in my memory by a subsequent production, boldly entitled “The True Story of Mandu and the Nepalese Children’s Circus”, in which a dastardly ringmaster named Donald, with a blond quiff and a glamorous wife named Melania, kidnaps a band of orphans to work in his circus. I think the children were Nepalese because Nepal happened to be the CWA’s country of study that year.
Where the ideas for these absurdly plotted extravaganzas came from I really don’t know, but original they most certainly were. The most recent one, in 2020, predicated on the unlikely love affair between an Egyptian princess called Cleo and the local slave union boss, Tony, was called “Crazy Rich Egyptians”. None of these productions made it to the West End but they will, I suspect, live in the memory of a certain cohort of Burren Junction children and their parents for years to come.
Getting back to inventiveness versus creativity, it pains me to admit that when the idea of a camera inside a mobile phone was first suggested to me, I thought it was pointless. Why would anyone want a camera in their phone when, at that stage, we all had perfectly good, compact digital ones? My daughter, Charlotte, was way ahead of me on the phone thing. At the age of seven, she invented the Aniphone and launched her own business: making and marketing animal-themed phone holders. From memory, she had more than a dozen orders, the most popular being the cardboard lion.
While Charlotte’s invention might have required some refinement, evidence of inventiveness and creativity was definitely there, and the Aniphone had a much more practical application than other inventions I’ve read about, such the portable toaster or metal-detecting flip-flops. In the right hands, the Aniphone might have led to a lucrative collaboration with Apple or Samsung and a house on the French Riviera. But again, her parents didn’t push it. We just didn’t recognise the potential.
Every day, we all benefit from inventive and creative minds. I’m not thinking about the big breakthroughs, such as the wheel, antibiotics, electric lights or the internet. I’m thinking about the little ones that, on a good day, we all might have come up with if we’d seen the potential: kitchens with drawers, cans with ring-pulls and my favourite: suitcases with wheels.
One of my best-loved radio programs is the BBC’s “A History of the World in 100 Objects”. A hundred short programs retell humanity’s history through the objects we have made. One of the oldest ones chosen is the Olduvai handaxe. Discovered in Tanzania and dating back at least 1.2 million years, it’s described as the “Swiss Army knife of the Stone Age”. Fast forward more than a million years and Object No. 100 (spoiler alert) is the solar-powered lamp. It’s hard to imagine human inventiveness becoming any more effective than that although, personally, I wish someone would invent a way of preventing me from microwaving my mobile phone – yes, really – but that’s another story.
