Any Colour You Want, As Long As It's White

Our dryer is on the fritz and I have discovered that shopping for a new dryer is a truly soul-killing experience. The tumble dryer is the last frontier of un-design.

You can buy the most wonderfully designed appliances for your home. Smart microwave ovens. Sleek refrigerators. Kettles with verve. You can even buy a washing machine that looks good. But a good-looking dryer? No way. You walk into a store and you get to stand in front of 7 identical white cuboid blocks of stainless steel and pick one.

You can try to ask a salesman what's the difference between them. If you're lucky you might even get a shrug of the shoulders in reply. There was one particularly god-awful machine I saw that had a shoe-rack built in. A shoe-rack! I get it, it's a clever idea for people with athletic lifestyles and smelly feet, but it's not attractive merchandizing!

How about some colors? Would it kill someone to make a black dryer? Or a silvery blue one? And how about an LCD display? Something that actually makes a dryer look different from a miniature electric crematorium? And no, I would not sue anyone if they decided to slap on a brushed metal finish.

Some chance. The choice is between Japanese machines that have no LEDs or LCDs, German machines that have no curves or elegant lines, and British ones that are as stolid and boring as you would expect. So of course that's the one we ended up getting. At least it promised nothing and delivered what it promised.