There was a moment last week when I felt horribly like the odd one out at the office party, the only person who's turned up in suspenders dressed for a vicars' and tarts' booze-up when everyone else is in normal casualwear. I was standing in the middle of a huge space at the Earls Court Exhibition

complex, surrounded by animated men and women drinking white wine and beer, wearing smart black dresses, clean-cut suits and dark- framed glasses. These people were either product designers, the press who write about design, people who sell cutting-edge furniture or architects. They seemed so bloody smug I had to fight an uncontrollable urge to whip out a paintball gun and spray the whole lot with some non-approved shade of duck-egg blue. I had just spent an hour wandering forlornly around an exhibition called 100% Design. Before that I'd spent another hour fruitlessly scouring its neighbouring event 100% Detail. In case you missed it, last week was London's first ever Design Festival. Hundreds of events, from swanky conferences (the grandly titled World Creative Forum) to tiny furniture shops to museums opened their doors to celebrate. Did you know that apparently one in five of all new jobs in London are in the so-called "creative industries" and that they now contribute a massive pounds 21bn to our economy?

I know, because I am now officially a design victim, or, to put it another way, a mug. I have contributed to this boom by commissioning and paying for a new house to be built designed by a "cutting-edge" architect. That project is now four months late, I am reduced to renting a bedsit to work in as I am homeless in London, and the project is, conservatively speaking, around pounds 100,000 over budget. Don't get me wrong, I have the highest respect for brilliant architects and designers. It's just that most of them never learn the meaning of one important word throughout their long and arduous training. That word is "cheap", followed by the phrase their jaws are not programmed to speak and their brains are incapable of comprehend- ing, "sticking to the budget". You can tell I'm bitter, can't you? Cynical, but still holding my head high.

I walked around 100% Design with the intention of searching for a new dining table. I'd bypassed the chance to attend the World Creative Forum (spending pounds 1,250 on a ticket to hear my own architect speak when I've just emptied my bank account to pay for flooring seemed pointless) and get top tips from Daniel Libeskind, Antony Gormley and even Rowan Pelling in favour of schlepping around Earls Court to pick up a table and a sofa.

It's funny, isn't it, how we are supposed to be experiencing a hot- bed of design talent in the UK at the moment, and yet all these black- suited poseurs seem capable of coming up with it are threadbare variations of old themes. They don't live with the normal requirements of you and I, dear readers. They are obsessed with low coffee tables shaped like rounded oblongs, nasty rectangular baths in every material from marble to concrete and a lot of low, back- breaking 1970s-style sofas which take up a huge amount of space in practical colours such as white.

In fact, most of the stuff here seemed the design equivalent of a trip down memory lane 30 years ago. Now, I don't wear secondhand clothes - anyone over 40 who does just looks sad, as if they've raided their attic - and I certainly don't want to sit on a pastiche of something designed by Verner Panton circa 1965-70. I hate plywood, so what's so great about remaking hideous 1930s ply chairs now? I can't see the point of a chaise longue; it's something furniture designers keep coming up with and calling "day beds". Do you know anyone who would pay pounds ,1500 for a metal-mesh day bed?

And so I stomped around, passing a stand where a Japanese assistant was wearing a canvas belt studded with lights - a new way of illuminating your next dinner party. Another man was extolling the virtues of a series of basins, each one a free-standing bowl in stone, guaranteed to slop water all over you when you turn the tap on. I'm sure I'll get over my anti-design rage, just as soon as I've thought of a legal way to come up with that pounds 100,000 which doesn't involve drug-dealing or prostitution. In the meantime, don't tell me London is the most creative city in the world. I know that only too well.

Mad dogs...

I'm sure that Matthew Scott is a very pleasant person, and that his dad is justifiably relieved and proud that young Matthew has so resourcefully escaped from his kidnappers in Colombia and is safe and well. But why did he decide to go on a backpacking holiday in one of the most dangerous places in the world? Why is he being described as if he is some kind of hero, when many people would be perfectly justified in describing him as foolhardy?

The Foreign Office advises against travelling to Colom-bia, and considers travel outside the main cities in remote countryside as extremely dangerous. The Rough Guide website contains many warnings about being kidnapped there, as does the Lonely Planet's. The US government and the Australian depart- ment of foreign affairs both warn against holidaying in Colombia, stating that backpackers are targeted by rival terrorist groups.