I'll proceed immediately to today's first order of business: click here for the catalogue accompanying the auction of items derived from the wool of Shrek, the sheep who escaped the shears for six years in New Zealand. I, personally, rather like the idea of my own made-to-fit Icebreaker Shrek, number 2 of 5 (Sir Edmund Hillary is getting number 1).

In between ogling woolly items, excluding OJ, I have been doing some thinking. And I have concluded that the world's ills will be solved by a single invention:

The ability to beam power.

What this means (well, it should be fairly self-explanatory, but Amy reads this so it needs expanding upon) is that just as we beam radio signals, visual signals, light signals etc, so we should eventually work out how to transmit power without the use of wires.

This, I believe, will be the end of the world as we know it. First in a good way, then in a bad way.

The first part will be achieved because suddenly, power will be available in all corners of the earth, on demand and in infinite (well, very large) supply. Humanitarian aid missions across the globe will be able to harness wireless energy to establish and maintain vital outposts in the most inhospitable of locations. Portable medical units will be able to quickly and efficiently tap into a power supply at the site of major disasters. Homes across developing continents such as Africa and Asia will be able (for a fee, of course, let's not be getting too Utopian) to access power without waiting perhaps decades or centuries for the traditionally prerequisite infrastructure to be laid down. Cars will be able to abandon fossil fuels in favour of wireless electricity, allowing the adaptation and successful implementation of existing electric vehicles without the inconvenience of having to charge them at regular intervals. The world will be a better place.

For around twenty years or so. Then some smart-alec gone wrong will figure out how to concentrate these wireless energy signals into a form of weapon capable of wreaking destruction beyond our wildest dreams. Vast beams of funnelled and focused energy will be harnessed as weapons, sweeping across battlefields and nations, obliterating all in their path. They will no doubt be tinged green, blue or red depending on which side they're on, and make a little humming noise when they hit each other.

The United States, realising that Israel, having just conquered China and declared itself a continent in its own right, is now coming under attack from Japan and Russia, will implement what will come to be known as a "Holy F**k It Is Star Wars" policy in order to protect its defenceless little ally. President Kerry Bush, the first female centrist US leader, will instruct NASA to establish wireless energy weapon modules in a number of the moon's craters as permanent military installations, capable of focusing their weapons arrays on any one corner of the globe at any point (to an accuracy level of +/- 100km, which in the words of Ms. President "will suffice"). The Sun will, in a moment its sub-editors would later rank alongside "SuperCaliGoBallisticCelticAreAtrocious", dub the moon the "Death Star". Tony Blair, however, now 92 and seeing out his days in a residential home in Sunderland - "so as to be near my favourite football team", he tells journalists - claims that there are definitely no weapons of mass destruction on the moon.

So in summary, my invention will bring 20 years of happiness followed by aeons of fear and destruction. But we'll be dead by then anyway, so who cares.