Enterprise Nation

Our lifestyle editor, Alex Johnson, thinks he probably drinks a little too much coffee but if his memory were a bit better he'd drink far too much. Read on to find out why - and what he’s been up to over the past couple of weeks in testing out a very smart mug.

Smart move

I've lost count of the number of times I've made myself a cafetiere of the hot stuff, then while I'm waiting the requisite three to five minutes for it to work its magic, got caught up in something else or taken a phone call and forgotten all about the rapidly cooling java.

Happily, over the last few weeks I've been trying out Smart Café's hot cafetiere mug model: it works exactly like a normal one-mug cafetiere but the whole plunging mechanism is nattily encased in a plastic double-walled mug to insulate it from the wintry UK summer.

Purists will probably not want to drink their coffee out of a plastic mug (even if it is designed by Sebastian Conran), but I've found it fine and certainly poured far fewer cold mugs of coffee onto the tomato plants. Available in platinum, graphite, red, yellow, cool blue and candy pink from www.pots-and-pans.co.uk

• Alex Johnson