Yarmouth, Yarmouth has many delights
Balmy days and barmy nights
Penny arcades and socio-economic deprevation
Shameless shops and a shopless station
But the tale I tell is of a shopping complex
The toilets within that thrill and yet vex
Hand dryers there were - not one but two
And I shall tell you of these in this, my review.

Ok so you can see why I don't do a poetry blog. But I find Yarmouth such a lyrical town that I just get carried away. The 2 hand dryers were in the shopping arcade. The first was a warner howard, pretty forgettable. I've used them before - they have one at Blickling Hall I think - and all you need to know is every person who I saw use it ended up finishing the drying process with the dryer I am about to get to.

Let's address the elephant in the room - yes this is a rip off of the Dyson Airblade. The real question is - is this such a bad thing? The nature of progress often involves building upon the foundations of what has come before - Newton and the shoulders he stood on spring to mind. It is inevitable that something as pioneering as the Airblade would be mimicked. Now in any art this is not necessarily something deserving credit. Say a new band comes along that sounds exactly like Spandau Ballet and we rule out coincidence (no-one's going to seriously argue that a sound as divine as the one the spands produced could happen again by chance) then where is the value in them? You may as well listen to messrs Hadley, Kemp, Kemp, Keeble  & Norman doing it with originality. But then what if that Spandau rip-off band end up using the Spands sound as a jumping-off point to produce their own, Spandau influenced, but unique sound. That would justify it. Most musicians start out imitating their heroes and the great ones transcend this.

So is this faux-airblade a stepping stone to greater innovations? I think it's too early to say but it is worth pointing out that it does have at least one notable difference from the airblade.

As you'll see in the high quality video below, this dryer (I didn't catch its name, isn't that always the way in public toilets though? You stick your hands in someone and in the heat of the moment forget to do introductions) has a delectable blue lit display which counts down from 10, with the idea being by 0 your hands are satisfactorily dry. I'm a man who likes extra dryness so for me I'd like them dry by 2 and have the last couple of numbers to achieve that extra "5 crackers in a nun's mouth" feel.

Perhaps the video does not convey this but it made me feel rather like James Bond, fighting the dastardly water villain as the clock ticks down on a bomb conveniently situated where I can stop it at the last second.

As I fondly remember this experience the answer comes like a flash of light in my mind. Who gives a shit if this rips off the airblade? Did it dry my hands well? yes - and 11 times better than the Warner Howard which wasn't ripping off the airblade. And maybe, just maybe Dyson might add a James Bond countdown to a future airblade model...