Why a toaster

I hadn’t questioned it before because I hadn’t been in a position to ask. Then one day, I am scrolling through furniture porn on Gumtree and I am struck by home appliances. The thought of them had never crossed my mind. Even though for some people (people like me) the first real thought you have in the morning is Breakfast feat. Toast. Let me explain before I get ahead of myself.

I never thought I would kit out a kitchen from scratch. Not any room, actually, had I ever considered would come empty. Have you ever lived in an empty room? No that’s madness. There are things in rooms and that’s what I’m used to. While living in shared flats and other people’s homes, it never occurred to me that you could choose a home appliance, like a washing machine. The place comes with one and if it breaks you/landlord buys a new one, but that’s a choice you’d rather not be making, because it would have been preferable for the machine not to have broken.

To start with a choice. It’s unfamiliar territory. I once lived in a flat that only had one tablespoon, so we just got on with it, adapting our cooking and coffee habits to live with just one spoon. It worked fine. After years of this “I'll take whatever's going” attitude to living, it never occurred to me that I could choose a toaster; or the colour of a wall; or the state of a lampshade. Dauntingly, approaching an unfurnished kitchen, I think to myself, ‘Consider the toaster.’

Why a toaster rather than a toaster-oven?

-       Would it be redundant to get a toaster-oven, if you already have a grill or an oven?

-       You should get a plain toaster because that’s all you need it for.

-       Think of the versatility of a toaster-oven. You can place chunks of cheese on bread and watch it turn into a cheese toastie. Pizza swirls lightly toasted. The possibility of kebabs, things on skewers, pinxos!

-       If you were staying at a friend’s house and in the morning, you went downstairs and you were faced with a toaster-oven, how would you feel? Slightly intimidated. It’s not the standard.

-       Bits of bread get stuck down toasters and they carbonize, or set on fire. How many times have you had to unplug the toaster to wiggle something out? Or turned it upside down to a burst of breadcrumbs?

-       The pop-up motion will be missed. That’s why they call them Pop-Tarts. Toasters are fun and defy gravity.

-       A toaster-oven probably pings when it’s done. What a mechanical, cheery noise.

-       If toaster-ovens are so great, then why does everybody own a toaster?

-       People like old-school toast. Butter and jam sort of thing. They don’t know what toast could be. In America more people own toaster-ovens than here.

-       Is it like British taps? They didn’t get better with time so, houses will stick to having two faucets; one for hot water, the other for cold water, when one faucet supplying a mixture of temperatures would certainly be better? Is it that we’re afraid of domestic technological advancement?

-       Are toaster-oven too luxurious? People want simple, honest, bread that’s toasted. None of this fancy-schmancy cinnamon-swirl shit.

-       Isn't a toaster-oven basically, a grill or an oven?

Childhood memories of transport links

I have always lived near transport links. My earliest memory is of the kalang kalang of a railway barrier, slowly but surely reclining its black and yellow arms to come down across the road so that the people on bicycles and feet would stop. Trains tore passed – kalang kalang whoosh judder kalang ROAR.

I think I thought, in my tiny confused state that we were on the move. Or about to move. I mean to be fair, we did move quite a lot. 13 times in my lifetime so far, and I think I stopped counting at 16.

But as a baby on my bed I could hear the trains on the tracks. That faraway kalang kalang was like birdsong to me but more regular and constant, like a woodpecker maybe. I liked hearing it in the distance burgeoning as I got closer (this is when I had grown older and larger) taking it as given that I could walk to the shops alone, head thrust skyward.

Strolling.

Stations I feel comfortable in are in the middle of nowhere. Like that two-storey flat we lived in overlooking a dank railway bridge made of muddy coloured brick with all the vines and weeds sprouting from the top of it. Placed between deep countryside and a Green Belt that station was a lone platform. Tickets £2 in to town, return.

In the autumnal red and golden brown, I’d cross the bridge with keys jangling in frost-bitten hands to fumble with the lock. Sunset. Bedroom under heaped-on covers I could feel the tremors from the cargo trains as they passed under through the dead of night. I liked vampires back then so maybe there were bats under there or a gothic station master waiting for the red signal that never came.

Screeching.

Imagination never stopped with train stations and all that waiting. The trains went past with regularity and that gave me hope because I knew people were travelling places and I could sit still and be there to listen. Is that strange? I never felt tempted to board one or to escape because that noise of transience made me feel at home.

Amazing stillness, forethought and possibility at stations when everyone else is moving rushing on ahead. I think I’ll wait for the next train. There’ll probably be another one.

Soon.