This brings us to London’s Design Museum. It’s a dozen years since Terence Conran turned a 1940s brick and concrete warehouse in Bermondsey into something that looked vaguely 1930s heroic-white-modern. It might not seem such a big deal now, but remember: that was in the Post-Modern decade. It was a restatement of modernist intent. What is it today?

It has drifted a bit down the years, always seeming more the hand-crafted bespoke object than the mass-market variety. Modernism won the style war, anyway: the museum was no longer the lone voice of purity and functionalism that its rather glacial architecture suggested in 1989 when Margaret Thatcher opened it. Modern design became moderately fashionable in the style mags and on TV and in some high street shops. Even so, you had to be a believer to go there, despite the surging throngs frequenting Conran’s many restaurants in the vicinity - including one in the Museum itself, but separated from it. True, people dropped into the café in the entrance lobby, but the entrance charge put most people off ascending the daunting marble stairs to the upper regions.

But now, the Design Museum is giving itself a bit of a going-over, and is staging two new shows that it hopes will appeal to carnivore and herbivore, hard head and soft centre, alike. In the vegetarian soft corner: the sculptural designer and gentle organicist Isamu Noguchi, a key figure in the post-war American and Japanese arts scenes. And in the meat-eating hard corner: the impossibly macho, head-banging, knicker-twanging, body-building £158,000 new Aston Martin V12 Vanquish, which runs on pure distilled testosterone.