A gap in the market?

Sometimes I scare myself.

There was a conversation in the office this afternoon about static electricity. This, in turn, led to one of those ooh-I-remember-that! discussions about physics lessons at school. Now, I don’t really get physics. I mean, I don’t understand why I need to know about things. The world just sort of works – I don’t need to know how.

The national curriculum and I didn’t see eye to eye on this and, until the age of thirteen, I sat through weekly physics lessons in a state of permanent confusion as my classmates ran little trolleys down slanty planks, or hung things off springs, or engaged in any manner of random activities that made little or no sense to me.

The one thing I did like, however, was the Van Der Graaf generator. For the uninitiated, this is a weird shiny dome thing that gives off some sort of electricity that makes your hair stick up but doesn’t kill you. Which is the best part, really. And then I got to thinking – where do you buy stuff like that?

Which is why I spent the afternoon googling “Van Der Graaf generator” and “physics supplies” and ended up wading through pages and pages of horrible prog album covers. And I still don’t know where a person, or even a school for that matter, might buy such a thing. Does anyone know? For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, it is imperative that I find out.

Christ.