fat trike

Fat tyre biking is well established with the Surly Moonlander, Speedway Cycles Fatback and other mountain bikes running enormous 4 inch wide endomorph tyres. These bikes are great on snow and sandbut if you add a load then they obviously begin to suffer.

Enter the fat trike. On sand this vehicle would be ideal. Desert sand where the big problem is carrying water. With wide forks and a 4 inch tyre on the front of, say, a kona steel frame and a trike conversion on the back running two giant fat tyres you could for around a €1500 convert a conventional mountain bike into a desert crossing monster.

the coffee bookshop

There are chains of coffee shops. There are chains (well, a chain) of bookshops. But the two have never been combined. PROPERLY. Except in Egypt. Yep. Two modern bookshops with very very nice coffee shops are Kotob Khan in Maadi, Cairo and its inspiration (which it has surpassed now) Diwan. In Egypt you can sell a posh cappucino for almost the same price as you can in the UK- there are enough posh Egyptians, foreign vistors and rich expats to pay for something as good if not better than what you get at home. But your wages and other costs are a tenth of the UK. Great business. So in Egypt the coffee shop becomes the centre of earning power but the books are what get people coming back time and again- and also buying books now and then.

You have to have a great selection of books. They could be secondhand- maybe they should be- but they have to be good. And the coffee has to be excellent. And quick. No mucking about. It's costa coffee meets The Bookshop in Wigtown (one of my favourite places). Great coffee is not rocket science. You can install a nespresso machine and pay 30p a cup and charge £2.30 for it if you can't make a Gaggia work. The main problem is that people who run coffee shops start skimping on costs and the people who work there are not monitored on the power and quality of their coffee making. get that right, have great books and you have the makings of a good chain.

portable camp fire

barbies are ok but you can't really sit round one and chew the fat, which is the main game in town during the outdoor months i'd say. The portable campfire solves this. when you live in a small house which is maybe rented you might be trepidatious about digging up the lawn or scarring the patio with a real camp fire. enter the portable version. rather like a large metal fan it is a series of galvanised metal blads that unfold to form a single circular dish/bowl within which you make the fire. It can be rested on a couple of bricks or even direct on concrete without marking it. on grass you can raise it up a few inches with bricks to save the turf. it can be moved too, which is great when the wind changes and the smoke gets in your face.

freek it!

Freek it! is a cross between a social network site and a freegan site.

The problem with free stuff sites like gumtree etc is that we don’t just want ANYONE to have our free stuff.

We want it to go to a GOOD HOME.

So you have your buddies – known as FREEKS who you list- each has a trust rating- they don’t know what theirs is.

But the higher the rating the more access they have to your free kit lists.

Your lists of free kit are like trade goods.

Trade goods- stuff you are prepared to give away to people who will use it and you like. These you list.

For everything you list you get a trade credit.

If someone wants one they send the postage, or one of their trade goods you like. If postage you also get a trade credit. You use the trade credit when you want someone else’s thing for free and they don’t want something of yours.

You browse each others trade goods. If your rating is enough their stuff will show up. If your rating is too low it just won’t show up.

agatha christie's akhnaton a musical

Agatha Christie wrote a seldom performed play about Akhnaton, Nefertiti and Tutankhamun. It has eleven scene changes and twenty speaking parts- too big and unwieldy for the modern theatre (it's never played in London) but perfect for a musical. Someone should do it: call it Akhnaton!

micro-festivals

Burning man was a great idea when it attracted a 100 people- can the same be said for a desert bash with 25,000 folk looking for a good time? Glastonbury? Even those new festivals that combine music and talk? The problem is that too many people creates an all too familiar sensation: people processing people. This should be the antithesis of a festival. I've found the green room and the organiser's hang out to be the best place at a festival- places ordinary goers are banned from. SO. The micro-festival has a maximum of 150 people. Everyone has to do something- either help or perform in some way. One and only one (alright maybe two) celebrity is in attendance- its nice to meet a celeb but too many is sickening to the soul. One is enough. The entry is governed informally- either you know it's on or you don't. No money changes hands but the land owner gets a gift from each participant- food or something nice or useful. The proto-micro festival is the garden festival. Have one this summer- fill your back garden with tents and a campfire and a bare minimum of perfomances or readings. It's the start of something big.

freecelebrity.com

Celebrities are loved...and hated. I'll never forget when at school Chris Tarrant showed up to do some filming in Abingdon. We were on a school trip to a local farm and he was parked in the car park we had to pass through. Kids mobbed his car and started rocking it and chanting 'swapshop....'- the competitor to his program Tiswas. Eventually he roared off in a fit of rage. Celebrities are useless and we know it. They are famous for being famous. And yet when you meet one and they are nice to you it is as if the sun just came out...kind of.

Freecelebrity.com is a service where celebrities offer themselves free to people who feel they need a bit of celebrity oomph. Celebrities are notorious for being self serving in their choice of 'good deed'- getting as much publicity for themselves as the cause. In freecelebrity.com they get nothing back as the event will not be publicised. It is merely for local gratification. For example, your garden club wants a bit of a lift- so Alan Titchmarsh comes along for free but no one is told until it happens. I see it as a kind of voluntary community service for celebrities. By signing up they lose control over what event they will be celeb-rating. This way punters know they are for real. Everyone wins.