This is the sort of question to ask at a party of shy librarians and then walk away. Within five minutes you’ll be guaranteed a shouting match.
It’s also a great question for list-compilers like bird spotters and Test cricket fans.
By the way, I do know what the answer is, but I’ll let you stew for a while in your own soup of conflicting thoughts.
Is it the telescope, or the internet, the transistor or vaccines? (By the way, that last one could earn you a slap. Fake science people can get surprisingly angry.)
Now, go further back and we have the control of fire, the stone axe, language or agriculture. All perfectly sensible contenders for the title “greatest thing ever invented”.
Of course, you could be facetious and say God or religion, but again that’s another slappable offence and a potential fire starter.
So after a great deal of thought I managed to whittle my contenders down to two possibilities.
I’ll start with the second-placed McVities Hobnob.
This humble rolled oat biscuit is hands-down, unarguably the greatest single tea-dunker in the world, and as we all know, a good biscuit dunk allows the mind to roam free and stand at the door of nirvana to consider the endless possibilities of life. A chewy Anzac comes close but for me, it doesn’t take the gold biscuit.
The experience of lowering a Hobnob into a cup of steaming liquorice tea can be compared to an orgasm without the messy and emotionally fraught preamble of sex.
The actual consumption of the tea-saturated oat biscuit is best described by the French expression “la petit mort” or “little death”, which evokes the temporary and blissful loss of consciousness that accompanies sexual climax. I find a gentle slurping sound delivered as the moistened oats flicker across the lips can help to heighten the experience.
And I am not alone in this hedonistic behaviour.
I have it on good authority that a former mayor of Shepparton was a devotee of the loud biscuit slurp during his morning tea break. Whether it was a McVities Hobnob or some other morning treat that helped him produce the audible slurp is not recorded, but apparently it was loud enough to annoy nearby executive bean-counters and thus stamp his authority over them. So the Hobnob can be a useful tool of politics as well as a thing of ecstasy.
But the power of the Hobnob is not limited to the sensual.
Consider this: the Hobnob was first introduced in 1985, the chocolate version in 1987. Two years later, the Berlin Wall came down, and communist states fell like dominoes across Europe. A coincidence? Hmmm. Very interesting.
So by now you’re thinking, if the Hobnob is the second greatest invention ever, for goodness sake what is number one?
Is it the printing press? Nope. Take a look at what that has brought us — witch burning, Mein Kampf and Truth Social.
No, the single greatest ever invention of mankind is of course, music.
More on that later.
I’ll just leave you with this: a lonely, spiritually empty person dunks a Hobnob into a cup of steaming liquorice tea while listening to The Lark Ascending by Vaughan Williams.
Try it.
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