Reasons to Drop-Off. [ The Plank ].

Reasons to Drop-Off. [ The Plank ].

Some years ago I saw a film entitled: The Man in the White Suit. It starred Alec Guinness, Joan Greenwood, and a host of British actors. It was billed as a comedy, to some probably a black comedy. In a nutshell it was about an odd ball industrial chemist, who invents a material that will last forever. Initially the material seen to be non-destructive, and so induces a complete panic, as the impact as this gradually seeps into the consciousness of the factory and then the local community. Fortunately after the panic has built to a reasonable high point the wonder material begins to disintegrate and turn to cotton wool as the structure became unstable. Everyone calmed down and the closing scene had the odd ball [Alec Guinness ], disappearing from the scene with a fanatical gleam in his eye.

When I was growing up the idea of the razor that did not wear out, or the light bulb that burnt forever was the constant source of stories, if not in the press, then I could always rely on my father mentioning one from time to time. These were usually on the lines of the inventions that were bought up by the powers that be to stop them upsetting the balance of the market. It was to be many years before my own experience brought me into first hand knowledge of the patent and trademark industry which existed under the grandiose title of Intellectual Property Industry. It became an interesting footnote and in some ways an ironic finish to my career as a designer, to end my working life in the administration of a company employed in the service of Patent and Trademark agents.

In the period I hawked my meagre services around London in 1986, the year after completion of my second novel: Change of Emphasis, without any takers for the manuscript, and I eventually claimed a berth in the firm, where I was to spent the next fourteen years. So many odd things happened in those months that I came to believe that I really had hit the jackpot with my shattering experience in the early seventies. Despite my failure to turn the experience into a marketable novel, the acceptance of the fact was to be a frustrating detail of my life for the next twenty years. It was in essence that I was like a genie that had a vision of what life could be like but what little had been revealed of the vision in the shape of my literary efforts in the early days of 1973, had been successfully stoppered.

For my own part the frustration was far less than total. I had the good sense to realise that even now after so much potential, had been unlocked by my vision and efforts to transmit it to other minds, I knew instinctively the time had not yet come to exploit it on the world stage. Such a revolutionary change and concept was mind bending, yet so startlingly obvious, once it had been examined from every angle, it became  an absolute fact to me that it should never be prematurely revealed and the time would reveal itself. In some ways my childish and somewhat naive view on the timing was linked to odd incidents that swirled about us. These incidents which I came to regard as straws of confirmation in the wind, that sooner or later success what be confirmed.