I went to the mid-year preview show at the Royal College of Art last night, which had work from industrial design, architecture and what I think was called the design interactions course. (It was so I packed I couldn’t get close enough to read the labels!)

Butterfly clips – from the metalwork course

Pretty things - accessories from the goldsmithing course

Exhausted cutlery - love it

Write-down radio – combo radio and Post-It Notes on top, so you can make notes about good stations

Pop-out, flat-pack goblets – just loved these pop-outs for pimping up your beakers

Auto-erotic jewellery – the necklace tightens when you receive mobile calls or text messages

Capsule reviews of handsets I’ve demo’d:

Blackberry Perl - terrible design, poor navigation and illogical menu layout

Nokia W800 – impressive screen, but complicated to connect and ultimately pointless

Nokia N93 – ugly design, but impressive attempt at video/screen/phone combo

Lobster - glitchy TV reception but easy navigation and pleasing handset design

HTC Touch - great navigation and good design, but not enough ‘touch’

iPhone – where do I start?!

It has been a while since I updated this list, so here goes…

Things that really warm my cockles:

- The smell of new carpets, freshly cut grass and new Apple Macs.
- Piglets, hedgehogs, seahorses, elephants, rays, bears and whales. They make me cry.
- Proper decent cider, at room temperature. (Ice and lemon? Bollocks!)
- Powdery lavender-ish cornflower blue.
- Really fresh, lightly steamed green vegetables with salt and butter.
- Guy Fawkes night.
- The bones in tinned fish. Boiled bones – num num num!
- Horses’ muzzles. Come to think of it, horse smell too. (I’m not a horsey girl though, promise.)

Things that really get my goat:

- Small talk. Say something interesting or shut the fuck up.
- People that end sentences with ‘so’ or ‘or’. Try it – and then slap yourself.
- People that walk too slowly. That’s nearly everyone.
- When the bubbles go up your neck and behind your head when you lean back in the bath. I don’t know why either.
- Waiters that take plates away while other people are still eating. Come to think of it, I’d be happy if they left everything on the table till we got our coats.
- While we’re on the subject – bad table manners. And people that won’t hold cutlery correctly.
- The “that’s not art” statement. Why not just wear a t-shirt that say “I have no imagination and like all my answers on a plate”.
- Abi Titmuss. I mean is that the best we can hope to aspire to? What exactly has she done that merits that celebrity? Ditto WAGs.
- Trago Mills. Evidently Hitler has not left the building.
- Tuning radios and TVs.
- Pot-holing under water. I will eat my own arm before I do that shit.
- ‘Ambient’ music on websites.

I’m carrier bag free, and have been since Christmas. I’ve been an obsessive recycler for years, but recycling glass bottles really annoys me. What on earth is the point of smashing up a totally good glass bottle and remaking it as a glass bottle? It just can’t be economical to make one form new than to wash on used one, surely?

When I was ten, we did a project about newspapers in Mrs Beeston’s class and I was so excited by the whole experience that I went home to make my own newspaper. I made about eight copies and hand-wrote them all, and made a potato print logo that I stamped on each page.

Not sure my business acumen was quite there; It took me a whole weekend to make eight twelve-page copies and I only charged 2p each. I’d learnt about how big the New York Times was, so drew a Garfield-style cartoon of a small dog struggling to pick the enormous newspaper up off the doormat. And the headline story was about our new kitten.

If I’d been twenty years younger, I would have been an obsessive teeny-blogger no doubt. (A couple of years later I started a photocopying bonanza with the more ambitious ‘Bunny Times’ and then moved on to elaborate psychedelic cartoons for the Sixth Form magazine Jism. But those are not seeing the light of day!)

I have become obsessed (some would say a little late) by Seasick Steve. Dirty, raw blues is absolutely my favourite thing in the world. I heard my Dad playing Led Zep when I was small and wondered who Plant was doing an impression of, and then found Robert Johnson… you know the rest.He is, as he said himself, “the cat’s miaow”.

On Jools Holland, New Year 2006.