The Emergency Breakfast Van

You know the feeling - there wasn't time for breakfast and you ran, empty-bellied, out of the door. Now you're on your way but you're hungry - not just a little peckish, looking forward to a biscuit with a mid-morning coffee, but really gut-achingly hungry, the kind of emptiness that takes over your mind and makes it impossible to think of anything but food...

So why don't you dive into a cafe you pass on the way? Well, if there wasn't time for breakfast at home there's hardly going to be time to nip into cafes. Even if you did, there's probably a queue stretching into the middle of next week. Perhaps you decide to chance it, only to be confronted by that dozy part-timer who never seems to understand what you're asking for, never seems to know where anything is and, even when they've finally located the thing right in front of them that you and three other people are pointing at, they have this knack of preparing things so that you can't see what they're doing. Consequently you end up with some vital component left out or - and this is worse - something you can't abide will have been slipped in. The whole thing is now inedible and destined for the nearest bin. You go on your miserable way out of pocket, twice as hungry and five times more fed up.

What you need is someone you can call up on a mobile phone and they'll see that exactly what you want, done precisely the way you want it, is brought to you en-route or waiting for you at your destination, hot, tasty and life-saving...

What you need is the emergency breakfast van - the rescue service for people who didn't have time for breakfast at home or can't dive into a breakfast bolt-holes along the way for whatever reason. In some ways, this the kind of thing you'd expect to read about in the pages of a magical story but we all know that rushing out without breakfast is a real thing and we need real a real solution here.

The emergency breakfast van works through mobile phone and web technology. You start off by signing up online and you'll be invited to select up to three breakfast options - say, tea with two slices of brown toast with Marmite, pot of yougurt and orange juice or bacon sandwich on white bread with builder's-strength tea and three sugars. Note that these items are fairly compact, can easily be eaten while sitting on a park or station platform bench, on the march or, as a last resort, at your desk when you get to work.

How does it all work? simply send a text message with your account number, the code for your chosen breakfast and satellite navigation technology in your phone tells the service centre where you are and the estimated time of arrival at your pick-up point. If you're on a bus or train the van can meet you at your stop, if you're walking or cycling the van comes direct to you. Don't panic if you're a driver stuck in a massive traffic - a nippy little emergency scooter will weave its way to you.

What does the emergency breakfast van look like? It's something like a mobile burger van with the robust cleanliness of an ambulance and the authority of a fire engine. Its livery is yellow and white with some touches of brown - the yellow and white reflect the colours of a breakfast egg or milk and butter while brown evokes toast, coffee or tea. Some have suggested the van could be shaped like an agg or a teapot but this would be impractical when you consider that you need a vehicle capable of taking corners at speed. Moreover, going without breakfast is a serious matter and the emergency breakfast van is a serious solution... leave the novelty vans in the amusement parks where they belong.

This all sounds most excellent, you say, where do I sign up? Sadly the emergency breakfast van currently exists only on these pages and, now that you've read this far, your imagination and mine. Perhaps someone with vision and money to invest may stumble on this blog and make the emergency breakfast van a reality but until then you'll just have to set the alarm a bit earlier...

Flying success!

The BBC sets a weekly themed challenge - last week it was "Flight"... How to illustrate flight? Simple, make a paper plane with a propeller you can spin and catch the movement with slow shutter speed. I used two colours and decided to fit a double propeller to see if I might get some interesting colour in the movement...

Getting the picture wasn't easy - I had to spin the propeller with one hand while holding the camera with the other and anything over 1/30 seemed to freeze the movement a bit too much. I found it wasn't worth using a tripod because every time I twirled the propeller the plane moved slightly and would have taken too much time... it had to be hand-held job...

I must have shot about 40 frames in about five minutes, most were rejects but I got three I was pleased with for different reasons and the one above looked the most effective - I was particularly pleased with the way the two colours showed up in the spin.

Anyway, off it went to BBC online and I was really happy to see that it was used: here's a link to the gallery - if that wasn't good enough it also featured as the thumbnail on the main "In pictures" page... a very good result!