Visionaries and dreamers have always been dusted with a little oddity.

That was the Alka-Seltzer moment, the moment when the tablet hits the water and begins to fizz.

Visionaries and dreamers have always been dusted with a little oddity.

Ideas for gadgets for the disabled were coming into my head so fast they seemed to be arriving from somewhere outside of me, beamed down by an unremitting force. I had little control over them, or their flow. I would wake up in the middle of the night. A blinding flash of an idea would rouse me from my bed and I'd rush down to my workshop to have a go at it before the inspiration dimmed.

But there is only one person I blame for getting shafted, and that's myself. I went into the deal which I thought would secure the future of Orange Aids with culpable impetuosity. I had been used to doing business on a handshake and my work of honour, and I made the error of actually believing what the men in the pin-striped suits told me.

As long as you've got slightly more perception than the average wrapped loaf, you could invent something.

The notion that inventors are anorak-wearing crackpots with glasses held together with Sellotape is beguiling but wrong.