There is a choice of finishes for Catherine Memmi Nouvelle Asie dinning table, but for me it could only be the drop dead sophisticated black lacquer. This mysterious piece of furniture is like a good actress, keeping a hint of exotic character while being able to play different roles in different scenarios. It could perform at buffet in a contemporary loft space or at a family dinner in an arts and crafts dinning room, at meeting in a legal firm or for afternoon-tea and mahjong. As with any star actress, I think it’s perfectly lovely doing nothing elegantly.

When I worked for the architect Remy Butler, We used to bring our ping pong bats to work with us to play in the park downstairs on rue de Bretagne.  On summer evenings when working late it made all the difference to pop downstairs for 20 minutes of table-tennis in the early evening before hitting the computers till mid-night.

However if we’d had one of these nifty roll up nets from decathalon sports stores, we could have played on the boardroom table during the darker months too. Way better than the old screw on metal systems, it clips on in an instant and net rolls into the up-stand when you’re finished.

This sport has come a long way from it’s early days when it was called “Wiff Waff”. It was invented in the late 19th century by British army officers batting a cork overs a over a row of books across the middle of a dinning table. Turning unruly behaviour into a sport seems like a wonderfully English thing to do.

-Oscar Wilde

G20, London April 1 2009