Creativity

Snooker tables, says Chris Newman, "provide six more pockets for Camelot executives to line". Or, he suggests, low-calorie grazing for rabbits. Most educationally, however, he advises placing eight snooker tables end to end with a grapefruit at one end of the line and a pinhead at the other, for a scale model of Earth orbiting the Sun "with another grapefruit on another table somewhere in New York as Alpha Centauri". Martin Brown has a simpler educational use: "Yellow Times Red equals Yellow; Yellow times Yellow equals Brown; Pink plus Red equals Black ... " and so on. "If all children were made to learn their snooker tables," he says, "then perhaps the population might be more numerate."

Alex Harley has a useful idea for a turf-laying garden party: "Place snooker tables in position and turn on the music; everyone jumps and dances on the snooker tables until the legs have sunk into the ground - you will never have to water your lawn again." If you don't have a garden, she says, you can hang the table upside down from the ceiling to create diffused, romantic lighting. Mollie Caird also recommends snooker tables as garden turf, but suggests flooding them in the winter, as skating rinks for small rodents. Renee Gallagher and Jack Dolan, while recommending the use of snooker tables as giant, six-legged insect traps, point out that a flooded snooker table is correctly known as a pool table. John and Fiona Earle, however, warn against growing toadstools on your snooker table on a damp day, since toadstools properly belong to bar billiards.

Susan Tomes and Stanley Thomas both see how snooker tables can provide the perfect location for a kettle to gain revenge and call the pot black. Ms Tomes reminds us that Mozart composed his "Kegelstatt" Trio, K.498, while playing billiards, and believes that the snooker world championship in Sheffield may also have provided the inspiration for Arthur Miller's play, The Crucible.

Andrew Haynes has a perfect solution for anyone who missed out on the Batman and Robin party last night: turn your snooker table upside down and imagine it's Battersea Power Station. Michael Rubinstein keeps a snooker table handy in his car, "after charging all those pockets with the right variety of small change for parking, Tesco and Pay & Display meters, phones and pushy windscreen wipers".

"Snooker tables," says Dawn Bond, "are ideal for families of up to six to eat their breakfast boiled eggs in." Or to keep half-a-dozen miscreant onions in solitary confinement. Mike Pearts suggests placing them wherever people have to wait in line - stations, bus-stops, post offices - for queues to rest on.

"Hide it behind the sofa so that you have to bounce off three cushions to get to it," advises Roy Askew. "Bowling greens for leprechauns," says Giles Dumont. Finally, Nicholas E Gough has made the remarkable discovery that snooker tables are the ideal design for playing billiards on. Prizes to Martin Brown, Dawn Bond and Renee & Jack.

Next week, things to do with isobars. Meanwhile, we are told that the keepers of our atomic time are going to add a leap second to our year at the end of 30 June. Does anyone have any ideas what to do with this extra second? Tell us how you plan to spend it. All ideas welcome at: Creativity, The Independent, 1 Canada Square, Canary Wharf, London E14 5DL. Chambers Dictionary prizes will go to the senders of those we like best.