I have lots of ideas for businesses, which I usually have no intention of following up (because of lack of ambition, laziness and so on). I’ll give them to the world. If you make a fortune using my ideas, consider giving me a bottle of wine or something.

• Breakfast delivery route: Most people are too busy/lazy to get up in the morning and get fresh bread rolls or croissants from their local bakeries (this is a problem in France – other countries may not even have bakeries at all). The idea is to get a delivery service to bring fresh croissants to people in the morning. Basically this is the same as the old milk delivery or paper routes. Milk deliveries have disappeared not so much because it’s too expensive, but because the availability of fridges has made them useless. Although bread machines do exist, they don’t make croissants, and a good baker makes better bread (well, that’s not true everywhere – a scary number of bakers make bread that’s worse than supermarkets). I reckon it would work.

• Wine bank: You bought all that very nice wine from Bordeaux, and you were told it’s best to age it another three to ten years. Wine matures best at constant temperature of about 17C, preferably with high humidity. Clearly you can’t keep those bottles in your flat (it’s clutter, and temperature in flats tend to vary drastically), and so-called wine fridges are not a real solution (you’re not going to buy a 100-bottle fridge, put that in your bar, and fill it with bottles you can’t touch for three years) (okay, maybe you //are// going to do that, in which case my service won’t interest you). The solution is to take your wine to the bank: it’s just like a safe deposit box, you pay a small fee per bottle and per year kept and the temperature and humidity is guaranteed.