Independent Pursuits: Creativity

ANOMALIES: MAGUY Higgs raggedly rips another sheet from the pad to write: "...Cloning sheep may tempt the bold, but to cure the common cold/ Seems to daunt the most inventive (what's the need for an incentive?)/ One would think that Homo Sap. could produce a useful strap/ of adhesive tape to hold paper in the A4 mould/ To the block where it was sold, but it seems to leave him cold..."

Bruce Birchall seems to have become a tad grim in his interpretation. "We live in a world," he says, "where people send birthday presents to soap characters but leave their own relatives to die forgotten in shabby squalor, where the information superhighway can take our thoughts racing across the planet in nanoseconds, but people haven't anything worth saying". Mike Gifford finds it anomalous that we spend billions on education and literacy when you only need to write an "X" to change a government. He is also confused by the gnomalous fact that so many Swiss bankers are over 6ft tall these days.

Pat Henderson wants to know why it takes as long to microwave a full meal as it does to open a packet of biscuits, while Mr A Harrison was surprised to discover that the company that boasts that it makes spectacles in an hour can't fit him in for an eye test for two weeks. Len Clarke wants to know why, in our sexually liberated society, it now takes up to 10 minutes to get to know a girl. Tom Gaunt fails to understand why recipients of calls to the US or Australia sound as if they are in the next room, when people within a 10-mile radius sound as if they are talking through a mattress. John A Rose cites Rose's Constant, which says the maximum number of slides any audience can bear is 30, and wonders why a slide show invariably consists of at least 300.

Dictionaries to Maguy Higgs and John A Rose. Paul Turner, meanwhile, despite creating his own anomaly in believing that the best way to place his creative suggestions is by being curmudgeonly in his accompanying letter, provides this challenge: to share with us those famous last words never said, such as Frankenstein's (or was it his monster's?) last words, "I don't think they gave me one". This goes right over my head, but will, I'm sure, provide inspiration for better brains.

Suggestions, please, to Creativity, The Independent, Features, 18th Floor, 1 Canada Square, Canary Wharf, London E14 5DL. The top two, or three if someone has suggested the week's theme, will win a Chambers Dictionary. Results two weeks from today.