I suppose it comes to us all. When we’re just kids we do mix tapes, or we did and quite how that’s possible with Spotify I don’t really know. Then we do the extravagent and usually inappropritate presents thing. But me, I’ve just crossed a boundary.
Stuff To Impress Girls
I just bought a butter dish. It struck me the other morning as I dug through the cupboard to find an unchipped ramekin that wasn’t blatantly an imperfectly-washed little glass dish that had recently had a Gu pudding in it, that there must be an alternative to slapping a tub of Lurpak on the breakfast table. The company was delightful, the morning sunny, the eggs had scrambled just about perfectly. Add a plastic tub of butter and I felt as if I was Sid James gurning ‘wrap your laughing gear round that, doll.’
I know I had a butter dish at one time. It was terracotta, which made me think it should be left out instead of put back in the fridge in summer, meaning I had a rancid yellow slick of ghee in the bottom of it which would have made anyone think twice about a re-match. But it was gone, along with every other butter dish in every shop in Bridport. Ditto butter knives.
A few years ago in Spain I found an Arab woman who spoke faultless English and German who tempted me with a Brotchenmesser. With elegant thoroughness Germans had not only invented a special knife that cuts your bread rolls neatly, but arranged the blade so it spread butter as well. I wanted one and in one of those so stupid false economies, thought I shouldn’t spend the eight euros or whatever it was but torture myself about it for the rest of my life instead. But that was then. The past is another country and besides, that butter’s been spread. For some reason every junk shop, charity shop, flea market stall and antique shop is seeing a run on butter dishes. Nobody has one. There was just one oh-so-ironic one marked Lurpak in the Oxfam shop, but say what you may I’m not having anything on my table with a grinning dwarf moulded onto it. The rather fetching French glass possible butter dish (as in it possibly was one but I don’t know if the French go in for butter dishes. Do they? Do Thais? Armenians?) was nice but I couldn’t decide if it was 1930s as claimed, 1950s as it could be at a pinch or that 1960s-could-be-any-time-in-the-’80s French design period, so I left it.
I ended-up with what looks like a butter dish but actually is a pate dish, undubitably also French and of a size to take a huge tub of Lurpak big enough to grease a pig. Should the need arise.
For our younger readers who’ve never heard of AA Milne’s The King’s Breakfast, make like a dolphin and click here.
