Well, it seems like forever since I last updated, but there’s a reason. I’ve been locked away in my laboratory (housed in a replica 15th Century gothic castle and staffed entirely by genuine mute hunchbacks from Eastern Europe) in a frantic session of inventiveness that has finally taken shape and given fruit.

The problem I was working on was a simple yet vexing one, you know when you’re drinking a can of pop and then wander off to do something else? When you come back to finish it off you realise that the housefly which was buzzing around is nowhere to be seen, where did it go? is it in the can? You try to hold the can up to the window and look through the hole but you can never see anything, sometimes you might even risk it and take a swig with clenched teeth to catch the thing before it goes down your throat, but basically the experience has been ruined!

It was immediately apparent that there were a number of different ways of tackling this problem, I quickly whittled this down to four:

1. wipe out all insects.
2. replace the 330ml cans with a series of ten 33ml “swig-sized” cans which could be opened in sequence every time you want another sip.
3. add vast quantities of insect repellent to the drink to keep the flies away
4. have the hole on the bottom of the can so it is automatically protected every time you put it down.

I toiled day and night on these four possible solutions, regrettably losing a number of my favourite hunchbacks while testing solution 3 and temporarily losing my beloved Igor to injury when he slipped while cleaning up after the experiments on solution 4, when suddenly it occurred to me, the solution was far simpler than I could have imagined and makes use of a newly found natural resource inside my apartment complex (and which the more enterprising individual can easily be find in public parks and Natural Trust car parks on a Sunday morning).

So, with great pride I present the DingleSpeaks Can-Dom®, soon to be on sale at a shop near you (if they’re not already).

* Dingle Top Tip – for Coca Cola choose a lemon flavour Can-Dom® for a subtle twist on “coke with a twist”.

In the initial trials of the Can-Dom® I must admit I’ve been getting odd looks, this won’t deter me though, just imagine the odd looks the inventor of motor-cars got when he first took his new invention down to the petrol station to fill it up!

Next week – The Scone-Dom