A Toast to a Toaster
Back in the days when the World of Me was updated more frequently than the time it takes entire continents to shift, I confessed my undying love to the Tefal Avanti toaster. To recall, I absolutely loved the Avanti toaster; its even, high-speed toasting ability, multiple browning options and brushed aluminium casing assured that I would always remain in toast nirvana. And it wasn’t just me who’d been won over by the Avanti’s superior toasting ability, by pure chance I’d discovered that friends and family had also become acolytes to the way of the Avanti toaster as well!
It seemed that everyone and anyone had a Tefal Avanti Toaster.
I no longer have a Tefal Avanti toaster.
My toaster died on Friday morning. The plungery-lever mechanism thingy had failed, meaning that I had to manually hold the lever down whilst the bread was toasting. I felt saddened, it was the end of an era, my beloved toaster would have to be replaced. But with what? With another Tefal Avanti toaster of course!
The original Avnti toaster is no longer available. Luckily, the boffins at Tefal had created the Tefal Avanti 2 (The Return of The Toaster)*, a sleeker, shinier version of their already legendary toaster. Armed with my debit card and dreams of toasty goodness, I raced out to the Swindon branch of Comet only to find that they didn’t sell any Tefal Avanti 2 toasters. In fact they didn’t sell any Tefal toasters, as neither did Currys, Argos, or Robert Dyas. Dejected, discouraged and de-toastered, I returned home to check on-line to see if anyone could sell me a Tefal Avanti 2 toaster.
No one can. It’s been discontinued. Tefal no longer make toasters (apart from this abomination).
It’s been four days since I’ve had any toast. I need a toaster, NOW!
Today, during my lunch-break, I braved the howling winds and torrential rains to return to Currys and purchase myself a new toaster. After much deliberation of prices, inspection of crumb trays and guestimation of the size of a toaster’s bread slot (hint: when buying a toaster, always take a slice of bread with you – some toasters are bigger than others) I came away with a Krups FEM2 Toastexpert high-speed toaster. It wasn’t the cheapest toaster in the store, it wasn’t the most expensive, it wasn’t the biggest or the most special-featured (it can warm croissants though) but it is the nearest they had to my beloved Avanti.
I’ve no time to make any toast today so I cannot tell you how well the Krups FEM2 performs. Come back after breakfast time tomorrow to find out if the FEM2 is the new successor to the toast-throne.