The best five inventions

I like inventions. I admire the inventiveness of inventions. If it hadn't been for all the inventors who have gone before me inventing so many inventions, I would have liked to have invented some inventions myself. However, some inventions are better than others. Reggae Reggae sauce and a whiteboard that comes in a roll like aluminium foil have both served their inventors very well, but we'd probably have muddled by without them. Even though our lives may have been a bit devoid of reggae flavour.

Not so with the following five inventions. Without these five inventions, I'm pretty sure that life today wouldn't be nearly so sweet. And in countries where life is already shitty, their absence would surely make existence seem like it wasn't even worth the struggle. So a timely salute, then, to the five best inventions ever invented. By inventors.

1. The wheel

A wheel, yesterday

It's a bit clichéd perhaps, but without the wheel and fire, humanity would probably have not advanced to the point that you could be sat in a centrally-heated building reading this shit and pretending to work. But whereas fire is a naturally occurring element, wheels needed that little bit of extra grey matter to bring them into being. Wheels help people move stuff about.

2. The pencil

A pencil, yesterday. This one is called B. Noris.

The pencil was first invented when a warty old Cumbrian farmer stumbled upon one of the locally abundant seams of naturally occurring graphite in the Lake District. He then wrapped it up in a bit of leather and started writing all kinds of shit. Pencils are brilliant. They don't leak, they work when they're wet and you can rub out your mistakes. Pencils.

3. Nail clippers

Some nail clippers, yesterday

Can you imagine the exquisite misery life must have been before someone invented these bad boys? Nails are a pain in the arse, let's face it. Or rather, their tendency toward relentless growth is. I'm not even sure what people would have done before nail clippers. Presumably they'd have used blades of some sort (imagine the snaggly edges though! catching on the inside of your socks!) or if they were particularly intelligent they could have ground them down on an abrasive surface such as a rock or the skin underneath a Maltese pensioner's tit. Nail clippers are the basis of human civilisation. Control over our keratin is what separates us from the animals. (What separates the animals from us is that they're clever enough to not watch The X-Factor.)

4. Vaseline

Some Vaseline, yesterday. Your mother is a flabby whore.

The man who invented Vaseline viewed it as something of a panacea. He ate a teaspoon of it every night, for example, believing it to be beneficial for good digestion. It would certainly keep things moving. But let's not get side-tracked. Vaseline is the very essence of life. Without Vaseline, things would be miserable. It's good for dry skin, protecting from cuts and grazes and also a useful standby if any sailors are about. Whenever you are packing to go anywhere, you're not finished until you've got a pot of Vaseline and that's a fact.

5. The clit piercing gun