I was out for a couple of days last week, and then I've been trying to finalise a rather large project, so I've been distracted. And not in the mood for blogging. It keeps happening lately - that I skip a few days. I must find a way of dealing with that, for a skipped few days could easily slip into a skipped week or two. It would be better to give up entirely than to let that happen (and I was going to do that last year - give up, that is - but you persuaded me not to).
But my problem - if indeed it is a problem - is that I've never written posts in advance. I'm not one of those bloggers that builds up a folder of thirty or so drafts which are ready to be polished off at any time. No, I write a post (just like this one) and as soon as it's completed I post it.
Not everything is quite so spontaneous as that might suggest though. For I do have subjects that I might be thinking about for several days beforehand, and those are the ones that need some sort of clarification in my own mind before I commit my fingers to the keyboard. But there's one subject in particular that I've been thinking about for more than a year - and still I haven't clarified my thoughts, or even come close to deciding what I might want to say. That subject is: Phillipe Starck. And I've had the pictures to illustrate the post sat on my desktop for all that time. It's high time they were gone, though - so, without further ado, here's the first:

I'm saying nothing about it - but, boy, will I be glad that it's gone from my desktop and been consigned to my 'blog images' archive.
Which brings me on to the second picture that was going to illustrate this post that is now never going to happen. A picture of a very simple coffee cup (or an espresso cup, to be more precise):

It's a signal that I'm not now going to talk about Mr Starck - because, let's face it, he's perfectly capable of doing all the talking that's ever needed about Mr Starck. No, instead I'm going to tell you about this humble and unassuming little cup.
Now I'm a coffee drinker: in fact it's practically the only hot drink that ever passes my lips. But don't go thinking that I'm a coffeeholic. Because I'm not. All I need is one espresso in the morning, and that's it. I may ocassionally have a second, but never more than once or twice a month. And it's part of my routine that gets me started in the morning: a glass of orange juice, a fish-oil capsule (with a non-gelatine casing) and a cup of espresso - together with a browse through the morning paper. It never varies, that routine - does that make it a ritual? Or maybe it's just a habit? Nevertheless, you really wouldn't want to cross my path until that little indulgence has occurred. (It so reminds me of the lines from Roald Dahl's Revolting Rhymes "No proper wife would dare to question, such a sensible suggestion. Above all not at breakfast-time, When men are seldom at their prime".)
I've owned this cup (and its sister - or maybe it's a brother, for I have two which are identical) for some 15 years or more. I bought them in Bellagio on Lake Como, but they were something of an afterthought. For it was the espresso maker that had caught my eye: a light-grey aluminium affair with a shocking-pink base, styled in a sort of sub-Memphis way. But it needed two cups (for it had two 'spouts'), but cups that wouldn't clash with the pink. And so it was the neutral grey that first attracted my attention.
Of course, the espresso maker is long gone (as, I suspect, will be anything else that was styled in a sort of sub-Memphis way). But the cups remain. And the longer I own them the more I have come to appreciate their beauty. For they are perfect. The perfect size, the perfect weight, the perfect thickness and the perfect material. Why, even the perfect colour.
But they have no sense of being 'designed'. Rather, they convey the impression that they have 'evolved'. That they have taken on this particular form merely through the efforts of artisan involvement over many, many years. And they're all the better for it.
And now I'm not sure about the heading for this post. For I had imagined at the outset that I would describe these cups, in that horrible mind-numbing phrase, as being 'fit for purpose'. For indeed, they are on the one hand merely 'fit for purpose'. Yet, at the same time, they are so very much more than that.
If only everything that us designers designed was thus.
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