Thursday 27 June 2019

Toasters and tomatoes

My toaster popped its last piece of toast the other day, and despite He Who Can Fix Anything's most valiant efforts, it was declared  beyond salvation, particularly as a new one only costs R129. I scratched around in the pot drawer, where I knew we had one of those toasters you use on the gas, and we used that for a few days, but the time it took and the amount of gas used made the exercise fairly pointless.

So I hied me off to Clicks and bought a lovely new toaster, which came with a 3-page manual on how to use it - admittedly most of it was the usual warnings on not to use it in the bath or pull the plug out by the cord, but please, can there really be anybody in the world who needs instructions on a toaster? I can only imagine this is to cover themselves again lawsuits from the relatives of people who have electrocuted themselves.

While I was at the mall, I decided to have an early lunch of scrambled egg and rye, which came with cherry tomatoes. You will be familiar with the difficulty involved in piercing the skin of a tomato with anything less than a surgeon's scalpel, and I stabbed ineffectually at one with the prongs of a fork. Of course, the pressure caused the slightly cooked tomato to explode and send a projectile of juice and seeds a considerable distance. I managed to mop up the mess on the bench seat next to me, but couldn't bring myself to lean over and wipe the sleeve of the old lady at the table next door. I was barely able to control my laughter as she mopped at the splatter on the table in front of her, seemingly unaware of what it was or where it came from. The reason she seemed a bit out of it was because her companion, a woman somewhat younger than her, had not stopped talking since they sat down, and it was all about tigers. She had read somewhere that a man had kept a tiger in his flat for 5 years without anyone knowing and she said: "Now tell me that nobody heard the tiger roar?" Have you ever heard a tiger roar? I was already sniggering into my scrambled eggs, so the tomato juice story just made everything worse. By then I had had enough of the tiger saga and her droning, so I paid the bill and scuttled off before anything else untoward happened.

I'm pleased to say I successfully made 3 slices of toast without any incident!

A camping toaster

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