A cup with no handle? You know who's the mug

Of all the world's pressing problems, coffee cup design is surely the most urgent. How do you improve on perfection?

- with Richard Ord

Well, the team at Kinto designer coffee cups in Japan reckon they've done it.

By making them smaller, removing the handle and sticking an extra nought on the price tag!

Our new fancy-Dan coffee cups arrived in the post this week.

They cost a fortune and - hey, guess what - they came without handles and the bowl hovered somewhere between a normal cup and an espresso.

In other words, it was small! 'They're all the rage,' my current life-partner told me.

'But there's no handle,' I observed.

'You cup them in your hands,' she said.