A tempest in a teapot is perhaps the best description of the recent squabbles about opening the European Union s accession negotiations with Turkey.

Or there may be another way of doing it, which is to think about the problem in terms of what if you associate with moral philosophers is called the teapot problem.

That's kind of what the teapot looks like but the way you use it is you lay it on its back, and you put tea in, and then you fill it with water.

Only a year ago, at the IMF s annual meeting in Washington, DC, senior staff were telling anyone who would listen that the whole European sovereign debt panic was a tempest in a teapot.

You would strictly have to be agnostic about whether there is a teapot in orbit about Mars, but that doesn't mean you treat the likelihood of its existence as on all fours with its non existence.

So, for me, what was important is that this coffee set which is just a coffee pot, a teapot, and those are the pots sitting on a tray that they would have a coherence so, they would be Greg Lynn Alessi coffee pots but that everyone who bought one would have a one of a kind object that was unique in some way.