While most contestants also thought of using it as a missile, one embellished that idea by specifying that it be used in a political demonstration against “a hard-boiled dictator”.By distinguishing between mundane and exceptional creativity, I was able to award each contestant three marks: the first for a raw number of distinct responses, the second (carrying most weight) for the unusual responses, and the third for general breadth of vision.The seashells were popular as drinking vessels, loudspeakers, knuckle- dusters, wind-chimes, earmuffs, bras and for listening to the sea, but I particularly liked the ideas of selling them as the latest in condoms, using one to break the other, and holding them to the ears of dolphins and asking them if they could hear the land.Round two was a round of similarities and differences:1. In round one, the 45 contestants were set two tasks: first, to list as many uses as they could for a soft-boiled egg; then to find uses for a pair of conches (available for inspection).
The contestants were allowed 20 minutes to complete both tasks, and were told that greater credit would be given for producing ideas that were out of the ordinary. The marking scheme was in fact generated from the answers themselves. After quickly reading through a dozen sets of answers, I could quickly judge which responses were the most mundane. For the soft- boiled egg, almost everyone said “eat it” (one man scored a bonus point for not saying “eat it”) and most thought of putting it back on the stove to make a hard-boiled egg. Using the yolk as yellow paint was also popular, but putting it into your pocket to simulate elephantiasis of one testicle was clearly a response of a higher order of creativity.

We started, in the style validated over many creative Independent years, with the theme of unusual uses for common objects. How do you turn a newspaper column into an international competition? When the organisers of the first “Mind Sports Olympiad” asked me if I could run a Creativity competition for them, it would have been uncreative to say no So, with no idea of what I was going to do, I agreed. And that is how the event, which the MSO propagandists had the temerity to call the “World Creativity Championship”, began. It seems a promiscuous mis-spending of funds not to use the gear as it was intended.

But it took the microscope to make me truly aware of this truth.I’ve still got an old dissecting microscope which is gathering dust. One day when I retire, I would quite like to find a house in the country where I can take flowers apart and look at them through my microscope again.Yet the area of biology into which I emerged has become so complicated that an amateur with even a complex microscope can’t be said to be doing science, and I always want to be on the advancing edges because they are so mind-bendingly interesting.`Opera Works’, a series of six master-classes taken by Jonathan Miller, starts on Monday, 1 September, on BBC2 at 11.15pm.. Instead, I’m deeply committed to the self-evident idea that the nervous system is designed to look outside: we have these extremely elaborate senses which are beautifully designed to furnish us with gigantically detailed information about the world in which we are steering ourselves. It is in the discovery of the truth of the minutiae that you can begin to build the ingredients of the possibly large My mother was always a big exponent of this.

She was a writer, and she told me never to underestimate the importance of monotony. It is only if things are extremely quiet and monotonous that you can really see what gives the game away.My life has been a series of these micro-revelations. There have been small moments of understanding when I’ve seen the world in ways that I had not previously understood.However, I’m not really interested in my own personal pond life because it seems like maundering No meditations about myself or my feelings. I deal with the microscopic details of embarrassment and shyness, instead of having some great theory about love. What sort of posture does somebody stand in, when they are making a suggestion that they have a faint suspicion will be misinterpreted? So I told my Rodolfo not to look at Mimi, but instead to study his feet, and in that moment they discovered how to play the whole scene. That’s why I’ve been against large-scale concepts in the theatre.If there is any rule that I have followed – and I never followed it specifically – it is the magnificence of the trivial It is the overlooked and neglected which conceal the truth.