It makes an aspiring Epicurean weep.  We have just bought an electric, portable piano.   We went to some expense to build a suitable retractable shelf for its predecessor, so that  we could tuck it away out of sight when not required.   The new version is about an inch  (25mms to those outside the US) higher.  It thus fails to fit the slot allotted to it. So what, you ask?

Surely you have noticed that products of all sorts are being made bigger, and are designed with many of the features of a spacecraft, as if they are destined for Mars –  bulbous, swollen, curvy, ugly.    The most obvious examples are les défis SUVs, the bane of the environment and the necessary appurtenance for every chatterbox with a cellphone. But even cookers and fridges are being made bigger, more rounded, more aerodynamic, and furniture, much of it gross, won’t fit in most houses that are more than fifty years old.

Don’t blame the Chinese.  They only manufacture these modern devices.  I am sure they wouldn’t have thought of packing electronic items in bubblepacks you cannot open, either.

But the product design is done in the West, at a time when we are supposed to be conserving the resources of the planet.  What do we do instead?  We use more resources on products of all kinds, to make them bigger, more blown up, puffed up, swollen and distended.    Far be it from me to criticize the taste of the average consumer, who presumably enjoys the look of these items. But the extravagance is what gets me.  Are products designed to reflect the looks of the over-weight and curvy people who buy them?  Epicurus told us to do things in moderation.