Patent application

When I was young, pyjama parties were all the thing among smart sets, like the Young Conservatives, not that I ever got invited to one. So this afternoon, mindful of the pent-up demand for any kind of party, particularly among thirty-something suburbanites, I thought I might patent something along the following lines.

The raw materials

The basic product

So I buy myself some plastic hoops from ebay or wherever, half of them a metre and a half in diameter, the other half a quarter of a metre in diameter. Assemble along the lines suggested in the second snap. Hire a furloughed costumier to decorate some of them, some for her and some for him. And some plain.

Then said suburbanites can throw vodka and hoop parties on warm summer evenings in their gardens. With built in social distancing. That is to say, the party people can wear whatever they like, subject only to the rule that they must wear one of these hoop contraptions, hanging around their necks, under or over whatever else they might be wearing. Au choix. 

A little experimentation might be advisable to get the dimensions right, in particular the length of the four spokes joining the two hoops together. Maybe also add a touch of spice by making them do something unpleasant, like generating mild electric shocks and sparking if they touch.

PS 1: the metre and a half being a compromise between the words of the Bullingdon bomber and those of the medicos.

PS 2: otherwise a red letter day, as at Scrabble as BH was kind enough to place a 'Z' near enough the triple word for me to score 66 with 'Quiz'. The biggest go-score for a while, my having some dim memory of having used all seven letters at some point in the lockdown. But despite carrying on pretty well, our combined score was only slightly more than 500 - with our only having got to 550 very occasionally and 600 never. We live in hope.