Toaster

Toaster: A machine for browning break to a crispy golden brown, perfect for spreading peanut butter and raspberry jam on.

Our toaster – from Tefal – is an amazing machine. Avanti by name and mostly avanti by nature. If you put one average slice of bread in and push it down, you never know how the toasted slice will be returned to you. Tossed high into the air, thrown petulantly onto the floor – or (if in Jeeves mode) caught on the machine by the corner and presented to you with an ironic bow. Never a dull moment (at least if I'm by myself – it returns to toaster normality with two and thicker-sliced portions!)

Simple, perfect, does what it's designed to do. Pure, unadulterated Bauhaus design.

The Babbitts' house was five years old. It was all as competent and glossy as this bedroom. It had the best of taste, the best of inexpensive rugs, a simple and laudable architecture, and the latest conveniences. Throughout, electricity took the place of candles and slatternly hearth-fires. Along the bedroom baseboard were three plugs for electric lamps, concealed by little brass doors. In the halls were plugs for the vacuum cleaner, and in the living-room plugs for the piano lamp, for the electric fan. The trim dining-room (with its admirable oak buffet, its leaded-glass cupboard, its creamy plaster walls, its modest scene of a salmon expiring upon a pile of oysters) had plugs which supplied the electric percolator and the electric toaster.