Do you believe in magic? Would you like to meet the fastest truncheon in the Wild West? Sir Terry Pratchett – who later of course went on to conquer the fantasy universe with his extraordinary and beloved series Discworld – was just seventeen when he sat down to write these fourteen hilarious flights of a rather extraordinary imagination. Following on from the first and triumphantly bestselling short-story collection Dragons at Crumbling Castle, The Witch's Vacuum Cleaner and Other Stories simply brims with all the wild ideas and delicious plotting Sir Terry later evolved to captivate millions of readers around the world. Returning too is illustrator Mark Beech, on hand again to breathe his brilliant visual effervescence into every story. And now, for Sir Terry Pratchett connoisseurs everywhere, we present the slipcase Collector’s Edition, an utterly gorgeous, hardcover version of the text which is available only in strictly limited numbers. Retailing at £25, the Collector’s Edition is a lasting tribute to a great and much-missed mind.

Go on, have a guess what I’m holding in my hand in the photo. Nope, Mr Green has not been tearing his hair out about one of my crazy schemes … And I haven’t given the rabbit a trim for the summer … Once upon a time, Mr Green and I were driving somewhere when we spotted a vacuum cleaner on the kerbside. The owner had put it out for rubbish collection. Back in the good old days we didn’t own a vacuum; we had a carpet sweeper which was on its last legs and I don’t know about you, but using a carpet sweeper on stairs that go around a corner is not the easiest of chores. You have to get down on your hands and knees and sweep the carpet. Good for a general body workout, not so good for convenience. Anyway, we decided to ask the person if we could take the vacuum – they were only too pleased to see it go to a new loving home. We asked them what was wrong with it but they didn’t know. All they knew was it had lost its power and no longer picked anything up off the floor.

Sounds a bit like a teenager… Mr Green, being a bit of a Robinson Crusoe on the quiet, decided no challenge was too big and set to work to identify the problem. He toiled for hours (ok, for 5 minutes), sweating and erm, toiling before coming back into the house with a perfectly working vacuum cleaner.shark vacuum cleaner support I know you don’t believe me, but as true as I’m sitting here typing, I promise that was the extent of the damage. jual water vacuum cleanerA full bag that needed emptying.cheap bagless vacuum cleaner reviews So this week history started to repeat itself. My vacuum lost its suck no less and it was making all sorts of ‘that’ll be the motor packing up’ kind of sounds.

Feeling very ‘Girl Friday’ and being the eternal optimist I decided I could fix it. After taking everything apart, inspecting the pipes and finding no blockage (and no, it didn’t need emptying either) I turned the vacuum over and discovered a horrifying sight: Yep, basically my landing carpet, bunny fur and goodness knows what else was wrapped around the brushes. No wonder it wasn’t picking anything up, there was nowhere left for it to go. I set to work pulling off the tangled mess (and I have to confess it was a strangely therapeutic task) to reveal my tiny purple brushes to the world again. With a hop and a skip they set to work and my floors look as good as new. My challenge to you, should you choose to accept it, is to pull out your vacuum and give it a bit of a clean out – check the bag or cylinder, clean out the pipes and check those brushes while you’re at it. If you don’t have a vacuum, join in the fun by pulling all the hairs and fluff off some velcro and then annoy someone with the sound afterwards – how much fun is that!?

Exasperated with his vacuum, James Dyson took some cardboard, kitchen scissors, and duct tape and patched together his first bagless machine. With some trepidation, he switched it on. “There were no explosions, no blasts of dusty air,” Dyson recalls of that day in 1978. “I was the only man in the world with a bagless vacuum cleaner!” The British inventor could not have known then that it would take thousands more prototypes—and years of debt, lawsuits, fury, and frustration—before he manufactured what is now the top-selling upright vacuum cleaner in the United States. Along the way, he would discover the simple secret to success: “People buy products if they’re better.” Dyson, 61, didn’t start out as an engineer. He had trained at the Royal College of Art in London. There he’d discovered a love of industrial design and collaborated on his first product, the Sea Truck, an indestructible boat for hauling just about anything between islands. He started his first company to manufacture and sell another invention, the Ballbarrow, a radical redesign of the wheelbarrow that used a ball to stabilize an otherwise wobbly vehicle.

Garden center owners giggled nervously, but customers got it. “People will make leaps of faith and get excited by your product,” says Dyson, “if you just get it in front of them.” But disagreements with the board led Dyson to leave his company and his invention. In his “naked naïveté,” as he puts it, he had assigned the patent to the company rather than to himself. It was a mistake he wouldn’t make again. Not one to suffer setbacks, Dyson set to work on perfecting the vacuum. Key to his innovative design was a cyclone, a cone spinning so fast that its centrifugal force sucked up dust and flung it at the canister’s walls. He hoped to license the design to European companies already in the business, but he encountered a chronic defensiveness: If there were a better way to make vacuums, surely the market leaders would have found it. In 1986, eight years after his original breakthrough, Dyson licensed his designs to a Japanese company. The deal didn’t give him a significant cut of the annual $20 million in sales, but it was enough to keep him going while he looked for a U.S. manufacturer.