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My friend Linnéa is a remarkable woman. She arrived in this country less than 10 years ago, alone, impoverished and without any medical experience, yet she is now a highly regarded physiotherapist. But this is not why I find her remarkable. No, what fascinates me is her flesh. In particular, I am intrigued by the nodules of flesh just above her twin lobulus auriculae, with their succulent, pink protuberances and downy dusting of tiny golden hairs. To be absolutely specific, I am fascinated by the little hole between her tragus and anti-tragus, where she allowed me to insert my little finger in the interests of research for this article. In my opinion, my friend Linnéa has the most fascinating earholes I have ever seen. I believe they are evidence of human evolution for the electronic age.

Whereas most of our species have a U-shaped recess above the earlobe, Linnéa's lug-holes are elongated narrow slots. When a primitive being like me tries to wear a pair of iPod earphones, they always try to escape at the earliest opportunity. But when Linnéa listens to her iPod, those audio buds fit exactly into her ear slots and their wires are held in symbiosis, so that nothing short of clinical procedure can detach them. I would like to take this opportunity to share my thoughts with you about perfect designs for human beings who have not yet evolved like my friend Linnéa.

Big knockers

Let me begin in the 15th century and discuss

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knockers. The most satisfying door-knockers ever designed were those big, brass, medieval jobbies in the shape of a human hand. They still survive on Spanish and Italian portals. When you grasp them, it feels as if you're shaking hands with the household itself and its entire history.

In the machine age, it always frustrated me when visiting public toilets that nobody could design a hand-drier that worked as well as a medieval door-knocker. Mechanical hand-driers were ugly and noisy, they had nozzles that blew air in the wrong direction and they had buttons that never worked, and if the electric motor ever did grudgingly kick in, it was a toss up between barbecued fingers or dysentery. All that changed a year ago, when James Dyson launched his marvellous Airblade, a magical hand-drying robot that works as soon as you introduce your mits into its welcoming maw, and then emits a fraction of the noise and uses a fraction of the energy to take a fraction of the time to dry your hands perfectly. I love this design because it works for us Neanderthals. In fact, it is now the main reason I visit public toilets.

The most satisfying telephone ever designed is the 1956 model made at the Bell Telephone Works in Antwerp. It has the sort of speaker that envelops and kisses your ear, and the mouthpiece is so cupped and curved I defy anyone not to talk dirty when using it. Stupid, rectangular cell phones are for people with stupid, rectangular cell heads, and these are few and far between, except in Portsmouth. I can't wait for Dyson to come up with a mobile phone designed for people-shaped people or, better still, a Dyson Bluetooth earpiece.

The best Bluetooth I have encountered so far is manufactured by an Australian outfit called the BlueAnt-Z9, and it is actually shaped to weld to a human ear as opposed to that of an Alsatian dog. Unfortunately, I've lost mine, so I am stuck with the Bluetooth device that came free with my Motorola and looks like a contraceptive coil for a Dalek.

Just a hunch