London Design Festival

We're in the middle of the 4th London Design Festival - 15 to 30 September - and, so far, it's dropped like a brick and sunk without trace. All the news has been about London Fashion Week and whether to ban anorectic models from the catwalks. (Okay, so clothes hang better on girls without boobs, but must fashion be a knobbly knees contest? Why not bind those boobs the way MGM did with Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz to make her look like a schoolgirl?) The most exciting thing about the London Design Festival is that Tom Dixon is giving away expanded polystyrene armchairs in Trafalgar Square tomorrow: Thursday 21 September. Wow! See if you can find anything better on the official website (title link), but I warn you it's a design bummer! Talk about user-unfriendly! Its home page takes 1 minute 25 seconds to load on a 56K modem. It has boring graphics, tiny fonts and the latest trend in eye-confusing menus that shift and flicker as you move your mouse pointer over them. Yuk! Cool Britannia? Forget it. This is Boring Britannia.