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.

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.

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.

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.

Answer the car cigarette friend. This is a small hard plastic device that clips into the crack of the window on the passenger side. With the window down about a centimetre it holds the 'friend' tight. The device is basically a tube with a flared end. The wind rushing past this creates a vacuum (Bernoulli's principle) which means air is being sucked through the pipe and out of the window. The car-side part of the pipe has a flat pan with grid marks for grubbing ash off the cig. This is then sucked at high speed, kind of like an aeroplane lavatory, out the window. When cig-fiend-friend has finished the butt it is shoved into the tube to be blown clear onto the highway. The tube is so designed that anything egressing hits the slip stream of the car and is carried away. OK, I know, not very eco- but have you ever had a cig butt blown back into the car through the rear window and have it set fire to the back seat- I have.

So- ash and butt are kept clear of pristine car interior. You have the smoke to inhale- but hell- as an ex-smoker it'll be like a trip down memory lane.